Max's Musings

A Horse With No Name

A Horse With No Name

My best memories of this song are not related to its US release in 1972 when it topped the Billboard charts. Rather, they are from the mid-eighties when my daughter was a little girl. She thought the song was hilarious--the prhase a "horse with no name" made her giggle every time she heard it. Those memories are foremost in my mind when I hear the song even today.

The song itself, however, has deeper a meaning for those who care to find it. Indeed, it' can be read as a metaphor for retreating from the bustle of modern life to the simpler world of nature. On the surface, though, it's just a story about a ride through the desert on a nameless horse. In places, the writing seems almost banal: "the heat was hot," or "plants and birds and rocks and things" fill the desert. Just things? And why no name for the horse?

And yet...no name adds mystery and the heat is so hot it defies description. "Plants and birds and rocks and things" injects a phantasmagoric indeteterminacy to the text. The music--the spare chords, the minstrel-like vocals--convey the sense of a mythic tale. The overall result makes the song an enigma, one which invites listeners to find their own story and to create their own meaning.

The story behind the creation of the song is, itself, an interesting story. All three members of the band America had US roots, having grown up on military bases, yet they were in the UK at the time. Dewey Bunnel, the song's composer--whose mother was from Yorkshire--had just graduated from high school in London. The drizzly, seemingly ever-present, rain made him long for his younger days, when he spent time riding through the deserts of Arizona. He's also cited paintings by Salvador Dali and E.M. Escher as inpsiring the desert images and the horse, respecitively. Indeed, the "things" in the desert could evoke the surrealist images of "The Persistence of Memory" and the Catalan landscape in that painting. Escher's art includes many etchings of repeated, interlaced horses, just as the lyrics repeat the image of the nameless horse.

The song's popular persistence affirms that there's more to it than just soft rock. People identify with the horse, wondering why the poor thing has no name? As if a name would somehow imbue the horse with more meaning, perhaps with an agency beyond mere transport. It is the horse, after all, that moves the minstrel through the desert journey.

Like any mythic tale, this one is both more and less than the words, more and less than the melody, more and less than the cadences and harmonies. Its minimalism is the source of its strength. For me, it brings to mind the words of Hemingway:

"I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish, and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough, they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, it's even truer than true.

                                                 
Some links.
                                                 
America singing A Horse With No Name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBcl8MIyv6w

                                                 
Lyrics
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/america/ahorsewithnoname.html

                                                 
Dali's Persistence of Memory (Several Dali paintings include deserts. I have no idea of this is the one that inspired Bunnnel, but it's probably Dali's most famous work The painting "Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory" is another that could have inspired him.)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Persistence-of-Memory

                                                 
M.C. Escher etching of horses (Again, I have no idea if this is the image Bunnel said inspired him, but it's typical of Escher's work)
https://arthive.com/escher/works/200342~Horse_No_8

                                                 
Article in The American Songwriter   on The Horse With No Name
https://americansongwriter.com/behind-the-song-horse-with-no-name/