Ball of Wax 42 Songs: The Foghorns – The Meaning of Life

For “The Meaning of Life,” the Foghorns have assumed their most unassuming permutation – just Bart Cameron, his voice and an acoustic guitar.  The result is, not surprisingly, stark, moving, and foreboding in a Midwestern Old Testament kind of way. Bart chronicles a litany of man-made horrors, commonplace atrocities of what Bob Dylan christened the “New Dark Ages” a quarter century ago. The lyrics mention “a boy on the bus again, a bomb” and “washed on the shore, a toddler in his shoes / face in the sand, next to a soldier’s boots,” imagery more terrible in the mind of a father of a young boy, which Bart happens to be.  The song finds grace in the inexorable love of fatherhood, sloughing off both the threat of a man left to the devices of free will and the need for ontological wholeness with the very human “there is no meaning / I need to hear you breathing” and “I don’t need a lover’s kiss / like I need to hear you breathing.”