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It begins, as the better things do, with something deceptively simple: a guitar riff. Not the ornamental sort, but a hard, clean, skeletal thing – the audible equivalent of a man rolling up his sleeves before a fight. David Jones, long-time fellow traveller of Australia’s rock fraternity, understands that beginnings matter. His riff doesn’t so much introduce the song as it stalks into the room and takes up residence. The title is a piece of poetry that could have fallen from the mouth of some Old Testament wanderer: Between My Shadow and the Sun. It suggests latitude, destiny, and the brief, narrowing corridor of a human life. Here the shadow is what you’ve made – the debris of your choices – and the sun is what was made for you before you arrived. Jones offers no cheap consolation for the gap between them. Instead, he hands you a spade and a moral imperative: “Take the light that is given… Weaving colour.” What’s notable is the way the song handles its thematic freight. You expect the weight, but you don’t expect it to dance. The verses lope forward with a menacing precision; each chord struck like a final warning. Then the chorus erupts – not with abandon, but with an almost martial exuberance. This is Jones playing tension-and-release with the sort of discipline that only comes from decades inside rehearsal rooms and on stages sticky with beer. Midway through, a bridge opens up – the guitar figures tighten, the rhythm section holds its nerve, and Jones’s voice climbs into a register that refuses to break. You hear the wear in his tone, but it’s the kind of wear that suggests resilience, not decay. And then we’re back to that riff, slightly recharged, as if it’s learned something in the intervening minutes.
Lyrically, it’s not merely message driven. Jones traffics in images – bones speaking semaphore, skeletons rusting into code – that resist paraphrase. They’re there to be inhabited, not explained. The closing choruses feel less like repetition and more like insistence: an idea hammered home until you’ve either absorbed it or fled the room. Between My Shadow and the Sun is a rock song, yes. But it’s also a compressed philosophy – about inheritance, legacy, and the narrow strip of daylight in which we get to act. Jones has no interest in telling you what to do with it. But he makes it impossible to ignore that you have it.
