Baby’s First Murder Ballad
I’ve Always Admired the Murder Ballad
It’s a form many of my favorite songwriters have explored, though rarely in ways that feel especially traditional. Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” turns an assassination into a sprawling history of American culture. Josh Ritter’s “Folk Bloodbath” gathers characters from old songs and sends them toward another round of violence. “Dead and Lovely” by Tom Waits approaches the form through doomed romance, while Wilco’s “Bull Black Nova” captures the spiraling anxiety of someone trying to escape the consequences of violence.
Then there are songs like “Long Black Veil,” which feel as though they’ve always existed. The story is so elemental that it hardly seems written: a murder, an innocent man, a secret lover, a grave, and a woman wandering through the darkness.
I didn’t set out to join that tradition when I wrote “Run, Virginia.” I don’t often write narrative songs, though some of the writers I admire most are masters of storytelling. For me, storytelling in a song requires a delicate balance. You’re trying to create people and events compelling enough to stand on their own while also cloaking your wounds in borrowed clothes.
The story may be invented. The emotional weather usually isn’t.
A Woman Leaves Virginia
“Run, Virginia” began well past midnight while I was lying in bed. Without any warning, a line arrived:
“When Virginia left Virginia, she headed to LA.”
I didn’t know who Virginia was, why she was leaving, or what would happen when she reached California. Mostly, I liked the repetition of her name. Virginia was both a person and a place, and she was putting as much distance as possible between the two.
The next line came almost immediately:
“She had a second cousin who had a place to stay.”
There was something strangely imposing about it. A second cousin with a place to stay isn’t much of a plan. It sounded provisional and slightly desperate, the kind of arrangement someone makes when staying where they are has become worse than heading somewhere they barely know.
From there, the story revealed itself line by line.
Virginia was pursued by “shapeless shadows.” I didn’t know exactly what they were, and I still don’t. They could’ve been memories, family history, fear, shame, or something more concrete and terrible that the song never names. Whatever they were, they followed her west. By the time she reached Arizona, she was already considering turning back.
But turning back to what?
That question became part of the song’s machinery. Virginia is always moving, but movement never guarantees escape. She begins the story fleeing her origins, then finds herself running from violence, judgment, and eventually the knowledge of what she’s done.
Nowhere to Run
The first two verses came quickly, and my instinct was that the chorus needed layers and repetition, as though the refrain itself were carrying something inescapable:
“Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
She's on the run, so terrified.”
At first, it describes a generalized terror. Virginia is already on the run before she’s committed any crime. After the murder, the same words appear to refer to the law. By the final chorus, the meaning has turned inward. There’s nowhere to hide because what follows her is no longer a person, a place, or even the threat of punishment.
She’s running from what’s inside.
The murder ballad has always relied on compression. A life can be redirected in a verse. A person can be introduced, condemned, and buried in four lines. “Run, Virginia” follows that tradition. It moves through named people and places with little explanation: Virginia, Arizona, Phoenix, Manny, Santa Fe. Each becomes an anchor for another stage of the journey.
Enter Manny
Then Manny appears:
“She met a man named Manny, who hated everyone.
His mind was like a riot powered by cocaine.”
Manny was a surprise to me. I didn’t know he was waiting in Phoenix until Virginia arrived there. I don’t know much about him beyond what the song reports, and I don’t know why he struck her.
I understand why she made him pay for it.
“The day he struck Virginia, she shot him in the face.”
The line is blunt because I didn’t want the song to luxuriate in the act itself. There’s no detailed confrontation, no heroic speech, and no attempt to transform the violence into spectacle. Manny hits her. She shoots him. The facts are delivered before anyone, including Virginia, has time to decide what they mean.
Still, I delighted in the uneasy pleasure of making the violence sound beautiful, justified, and even redemptive.
That discomfort is part of what’s kept murder ballads alive. Terrible things are carried by memorable melodies, repeated choruses, satisfying rhymes, and arrangements that make us want to hear the story again. The form asks us to enjoy the telling without necessarily approving of what’s been told.
The bridge gives the listener the closest thing the song has to a verdict:
“Damn, Virginia, didn’t know you had it in ya
He had it coming, but it’s time to disappear.”
There’s dark humor in the rhyme, but the moment also offers a brief rush of moral certainty. Manny had it coming. Virginia defended herself. Run while you still can.
What She’s Running From
The final verse complicates that certainty.
A more traditional version of the song might’ve ended with Virginia captured, executed, imprisoned, or lying dead beside Manny. The moral order would be restored through punishment. Instead, she escapes. She reaches Santa Fe and becomes a working artist, transferring her rage onto a canvas.
“Found redemption as an artist on a canvas full of rage.”
But the redemption is incomplete. Art gives her a language for what happened. It doesn’t erase it.
“Sometimes she wakes up in a frenzy, haunted by the ghost.
She knows there’s no forgiveness, just the punchline to a joke.”
Whether that ghost represents guilt, trauma, lost innocence, or the simple memory of violence doesn’t need to be resolved. The final line refuses any clean moral accounting. She survives and finds an outlet for her rage, only to discover that escape has delivered her into another kind of captivity.
She’s no longer running from Virginia. She may not even be running from the law. She’s running from the person she became in Phoenix and from the knowledge that survival required something she can never undo.
The murder doesn’t end the story. It changes what she’s running from.
That’s also where the song resists some conventions of the murder-ballad tradition. Virginia isn’t the beautiful dead woman whose purpose is to inspire grief, vengeance, or remorse in someone else. She survives. She acts. She makes a choice, however instinctive, and then has to inhabit the life that follows it.
The song doesn’t condemn or praise her. It observes and reports.
That distance is important to me. Much of my writing comes from a place of attention and attempted understanding rather than judgment. I’m interested in the moment when a person’s behavior becomes comprehensible without necessarily becoming excusable. In this case, the stakes are just more dramatic than usual.
Virginia gets away with killing Manny, at least in the legal sense. But escape isn’t the same as freedom, and survival isn’t the same as innocence.
The Music Had Already Made Room
Before I knew who Virginia was, the music had already made room for her. The bass and drums lock into a deep, midtempo groove that presses forward with a sense of inevitability, while Wurlitzer, warbled guitar, tape loops, and a droning unison figure move around one another at the edges. It has drive, but it never feels entirely secure.
The song is in F, though it often feels centered on G minor, the ii chord, so the tonal center never feels completely settled. The verses cycle through G minor, F, and C, a ii–I–V progression. The choruses move between C and F, the V and I chords in F, before landing on D7, a secondary dominant that points toward G minor instead of allowing the harmony to close cleanly.
When the bridge arrives, the song avoids that expected resolution and shifts toward B♭, beginning on E♭, a half step above the D7 that precedes it. That abrupt lift makes the modulation feel less like a formal key change and more like an unexpected turn in the road.
None of that was planned as narrative symbolism. The writing and production happened simultaneously. I had the beginning of a melody, but the lyrics arrived inside a musical space I’d already carved for them. The groove gave Virginia the need to keep moving. The harmony made every destination feel temporary.
Even the return to F after the bridge doesn’t feel like a homecoming. The song can return to where it began. Virginia can’t.
The final verse came the next morning while I was at work, during a remote meeting whose point I no longer remember. I couldn’t get Virginia out of my head.
I think it’s the verse I’m proudest of because the entire setup would’ve fallen apart if it hadn’t arrived correctly. The song begins with Virginia needing to flee, and it ends with her having fled, but not for any reason or under any circumstances she could’ve imagined when she left home.
She wanted distance from her origins. She found it. Then she created another past from which there could be no distance.
That may be what I find most compelling about narrative songwriting. Fiction allows you to step outside yourself, but it doesn’t let you leave yourself behind. You invent a person, give her a destination, and send her across the country. Then she begins carrying fears, questions, landscapes, and contradictions you recognize.
Virginia’s story isn’t mine. I’ve never fled across the desert after shooting a cocaine-fueled man named Manny in the face. But the impulse to run, the hope that another landscape might provide another life, the desire to turn rage into art, and the discovery that the past travels with you all feel familiar.
Those are the parts of ourselves we place in borrowed clothes.
I didn’t decide to write a murder ballad. A woman left Virginia in the middle of the night, and I followed her to see where she went.
Listen to That Was Zen, This Is Now
“Run, Virginia” appears on That Was Zen, This Is Now. Listen to the full album on your preferred streaming platform.