A Place To Call My Own [Tommy Shaw]

A Place To Call My Own
Written by Tommy Shaw
Lead Vocals by Tommy Shaw

Hold the lamplight to the night
See the empty streets
Rolling out of sight

Turn a deaf ear to the din
Ignore the hunger pangs
Bundle up against the wind

Still I believe
Someone waits for me

A place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
A future built on stone
A place to call my own

And once there was a time
I had no fear at all
None that I recall

No future there to taunt
No history to haunt me
No monsters in the wall

Still I believe
Someone waits for me

Oh, a place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
Of wood and bricks and stone

Oh, a place to call my own
Somewhere to be from
A shelter from the storm
Where I'll be safe and warm
A future built on stone
A place to call my own

Interpretation

Here it is, in Tommy's own words, from a 1998 interview with Matthew Wardlaw for Music's Bottom Line in Cleveland:

"...when I got divorced in 1993, it happened right at the beginning of the Damn Yankees Don’t Tread tour.  Suddenly all my stuff was in a Ryder truck packed up in New York and driven out to California and put in a storage place somewhere near the Burbank airport.  I was on the road and I was homeless for over three months.  It was like high class homelessness because I had money and I always had a roof over my head, it just wasn’t mine, I didn’t have an address.  It was funny for a couple of months, but after a while it was like 'ha ha ha, I’m homeless'.  'Where do you live?'  'On the Damn Yankees bus, what hotel are we in tonight?' Then I started looking at people who really were homeless.  It’s not that you want to be homeless.  You want an address.  Somebody says 'well, where can I find you?' it’s like 'you can’t!', somewhere to be from.  So I wrote if from that perspective.  It was a lofty homelessness for me, but that was enough!"