“Run from Thunder” is a joyful song. I love it for that reason. It’s about picking yourself up after a long fall. To say “what goes down must come up” isn’t exactly true, but I’d like to think it is. I wrote it in October of 2000 after the Collapsis tour was cancelled. I tweaked the words over the years to fit what it says now. There’s some broken gibberish in the song that is supposed to simulate both the Indian tongue and thunder, “Datta. Dayadhvam.” I found it in Eliot’s The Wasteland as I found the direction of the song.

Giving credit where credit is due (and, I think Eliot should have given Joyce more credit; I like to think of The Wasteland as mere Cliff Notes to Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses) the idea of running from thunder comes from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Joyce uses some really long gibberished words to express thunder even on the first page of the work. What he meant was that primitive people thought that thunder meant that God was angry and therefore, they should run and hide. If you think about it, not much has really changed in terms of primitive people being afraid of God, but the thunder part has fallen by the wayside.

In many ways, I feel as if “Run from Thunder” is a part of the same song I have been writing over and over again in recent years; its structure and sound is much like “Rusted Radio” and even “Don’t Fade Away.” In other ways, it’s a fresh piece. I had originally intended it to close The Return of Spring, but that album is very much on hold until I work out a great many things that need to happen first.

Datta, dayadhvam, damyata (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the meaning of the thunder is found in Bihandaranyaka, Upanishad, V, I. The fable describes how when the Creator speaks "Da," gods, men, and demons hear and respond to different commands.