Music ID Recordings Songs Videos Press Music Bio Bands Music Photos

Afternoon at the Cave

Beautiful Penguins

Beauty Queen

Black Water

Bomba de Tiempo

Cairo

Caracas 52

Come On Over Whitey

Contact Zone

Country Dancer

Crevice Invasion

Date With Destiny

Deniability

Dust Demon

Eohippus

Fish in the River

Go to Them

Great Wall of China

Hand Over Hand

Helicopter

Lalaila

Long Way Home

Love Chant

Mail Order Seahorses

Meteorite

Moses of Indiana

Motet 5

Moundbuilding

Nightcrawling

Open House

Pakala

Plains of Abraham

Plateau

Poetry in Motion

Precious Time

Ratpenis

The Rifted Valley

Seven Continents

The Sheep

Story of My Life

Tailspin

Tiare's Theme

Tomorrow Night

Too Close

What Time Is

Wireless

Yellow Mud

You Come From the Lake

3.1 & 2.4

Hand Over HandiTunes | Amazon | Google | Spotify Previous | Next
Written by Max in 1981 and newly arranged for the album Take Me Up.

"Jon Spayde paid me the ultimate compliment when he refused to believe I had written this song, thinking it was a traditional southern fieldworker's chant.

"I first recorded it in the basement of Dolores Street studio with myself and Mark Norris on vocals, Jon Spayde on conga, and Gary Tanner on bass. It was first performed by Terra Incognita a few days later at our debut show at Club Foot in February 1981. A year or two later it was recorded by the Didactyl Brothers in a rustic cabin outside Los Angeles; the rap in the new version is inspired by Mark Norris’s rap on that recording. I wrote several different versions of this song which were recorded and performed by different versions of Terra Incognita from 1985-1990. This new version is the closest in spirit to the original."

Lyrics

Hand over hand
hand over hand
hand over hand
up that ladder in the sky.
 
Hand over hand
hand over hand
hand over hand
up that ladder in the sky.
 
The bodies of the dead
fall into the sea,
The bodies of the dead
fall into the sea,
The bodies of the dead
fall into the sea,
From that ladder in the sky.
 

Copyright © Max Carmichael 1981, 1985, 2009, 2010.

All contents Copyright © 2010-2019 Max Carmichael