Crucial Track for February 16, 2026

"Pillar of Davidson" by LIVE

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#365songs (47 / 365)

Just read a news article thing about how various members of Live are squabbling with each other over what remains of the band's reputation, so I'll admit it: I still think Throwing Copper is pretty good, despite its being pretty corny in places and nearly every song on it doing the loud/quiet/loud thing, and "Pillar of Davidson" is probably my favorite song on there (these days "The Dam at Otter Creek" might be a contender, but I had a lot of affection for "Pillar" for a much longer time).

Despite being almost 7 minutes long, "Pillar of Davidson" is mercifully free of the lyrical howlers that Ed Kowalczyk sometimes commits: honestly, the opening line, "Warm bodies, I sense / are not machines that can only make money" hits pretty hard these days. And while it absolutely does the loud/quiet/loud thing, well... Throwing Copper does that so much because it works, and it works here. The verses are sparse minor-key affairs, the shift into a major key — but a borderline mournful melody — for the chorus is moving, the layered vocals in the outro are a suitable payoff for those 7 minutes. With the title and all the lyric's references to "the shepherd," there's a pseudo-religious grandiosity to it, the kind of thing that makes Live a love-hate proposition teetering at all times on the brink of po-faced cringe. But I like the unsourced, unattributed claim on Genius's page for the song that claims

> The "pillar of Davidson" refer [sic] to the Caterpillar and Harley Davidson plants in the band's hometown of York, PA; presumably these are two of the places that expects [sic] people to live as "machines that can only make money."

Singing about relatable economic realities in this kind of over-the-top register just kinda works for me. I think there's a straight line from "Pillar of Davidson," and maybe from Live in general, to "Nux Vomica," the first of my #365songs, which has a very similar kind of melodramatic religious vibe to it, and for that matter the singers sound similar in a lot of ways. Interesting how this project is making me draw connections I'd never thought of before.