#16, “Black Tornado,” Dan Bern (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #16, “Black Tornado,” Dan Bern (2001)

I used to get restless. The kind that has you climbing the walls of your room, desperate to escape, to see something other than the same walls you’ve been staring at. When I was eighteen, I’d get out and drive, sometimes to a diner or a late-night coffee shop, where I might see people I knew. When I was twenty-one and I didn’t know anyone, I’d sometimes drive nowhere, just circling the outer loop around San Antonio. When I was twenty-two and I didn’t have a car, I’d just walk, headphones on, for hours, through my neighborhood and through the University of Texas campus and through downtown and across the river and back, just to get the city underneath my feet. When I was twenty-four, those things didn’t cut it anymore and I got restless enough to chase that feeling around the whole country, until I ran out of America.

It still happens sometimes, but less often, and with less intensity. I have my theories about why, but they’re not that interesting to anybody else, I don’t think.

“Black Tornado” is a song about that very specific feeling, the feeling of your skin feeling too small for whatever is inside of you and needing to go and go and go because that feeling is driving you onward. Until I heard it, I didn’t know anybody else felt that way.

It’s not a very complicated song. It’s vaguely folk-rock, with a jangly guitar sound and Dan Bern singing in his nasal whine (complimentary), delivering one of the best vocal performances he ever gave. There’s a slide guitar in there somewhere, and eventually bass and drums and a harmonica, as it builds into something that sounds a little bit more like the feeling the song describes sounds in your body.

Dan Bern has always been a clever songwriter—sometimes too much of one—and “Black Tornado” has its clever bits. He sings it keeps me coming up for air / keeps me airing out some come, which is gross but also a neat bit of wordplay; he sings i could do tonight with something soft and warm and furry / but that ain’t likely to occur in south central missouri which is a satisfying rhyme, if also gross in a different way. But those lines stand out to me because they’re part of describing that feeling, the need to go and to be alone and to become the sort of feral thing that a young person with too much energy and nowhere good to put it can be.

The song starts with a line that was so specific that I couldn’t believe I didn’t write it. i been speaking later and later in the day, he sings, most days i don’t talk till maybe 8 o’clock at night. I used to cherish that, the days when I could be that alone on purpose. The next verse, too, starts with something I was in the middle of doing when I found the song. and every place i go is one less place i could call home. and every girl i kiss, i just cross her off my list, he sings there, i buried all of my old clothes out in some field in west des moines, and if you judge me tonight, judge me by the songs i write. that’s who i am to you.

It’s all very grandiose and self-obsessed, yes. But if you knew me when I was twenty-three, that probably wouldn’t come as a surprise.

There aren’t very many times in a person’s life, I don’t think, where they hear or see or read or watch something, some piece of art that someone else made, and they go that’s how i feel inside all the time. It’s magic, that connection, that feeling of being understood. It’s the reason that a million AI Drake songs or Chat-GPT “prompt engineers” or whatever aren’t adding anything useful to the world, because they’re not creating anything that can create that human connection, and that is ultimately the point of every creative endeavor—to find other people, to reach out ot them with an expression of our feelings, to try to make them feel something too. That’s true of my favorite songs but it’s also true of, I don’t know, The Bee Movie (2007). Whatever, literally anything made by people has the potential to make someone else feel something. If not understood, then maybe less alone, less sad, less focused on something that it doesn’t do much good to be focused on all of the time.

“Black Tornado” just hit me where I lived, and it gave me something, too—a metaphor for the exact feeling I had lived with for years that I didn’t know how to express. In the chorus, after singing about how everything is changing faster than i can describe, all i really know to do is grab the wheel and drive. i look for love, and some adventure, and i try not to let my own breathing scare me off the road, Dan Bern goes into a huge, meaty chorus, the sort of thing that, if Bruce Springsteen had written it instead of a relatively obscure singer/songwriter from Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico (an actual town!), would be famous and played at sports stadiums where nobody listened to the rest of the words to the song.

and there’s a black tornado, a black tornado, spinning around in my body sometimes, he sings. That’s the whole thing, just that single line, repeated several times, before the next verse. And something about hearing that unlocked what it was that I had been feeling so long. I had a black tornado spinning around in my body sometimes. Of course I would get so restless. Of course I couldn’t just sit at home until it passed. Of course I needed to grind miles beneath my tires for hours, days, weeks, months on end. I had a black tornado spinning around in my body sometimes.

Sometimes I still do. In those moments, I can still listen to “Black Tornado” and feel understood. And when I don’t, I can listen to the song and feel the way I felt when I was twenty-three and so restless I couldn’t sleep until I’d walked across the city at night. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand what a gift it is to connect with that feeling.