DESCRIPTION:
Artist: The Doors

Album: Strange Days

Date: 1967

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"Moonlight Drive"
Single by The Doors
from the album Strange Days

A-side "Love Me Two Times"
Released September 25, 1967
Recorded May and August 1967
Genre Psychedelic rock, blues rock
Length 3:04
Label Elektra
Writer(s) Jim Morrison
Robby Krieger
Ray Manzarek
John Densmore
Producer(s) Paul A. Rothchild

"Moonlight Drive" is a song from The Doors' second album Strange Days, and a B-side of "Love Me Two Times". Though a conventional blues arrangement, "Moonlight Drive"'s defining feature was its slightly off-beat rhythm, and Robby Krieger's 'Bottle-neck' guitar which creates an eerie sound. The song was recorded during the group's first demo recordings at Trans World Pacific Studios.

The song is known to fans as being one of the first written by lead singer Jim Morrison. According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, Morrison wrote "Moonlight Ride" during his halcyon days on a rooftop in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, California in 1965. Later on, when he happened upon friend and future band member Ray Manzarek, he uttered the memorable lines, "Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide." Reportedly Manzarek was awestruck, and they decided to form a band. Morrison already had a band name picked out; The Doors.

Recordings of live performances of the song reveal a link to a sort of death by drowning - whether murder, suicide or simply going too far. Morrison sings in live performances, probably improvising, referring to "fishes for your friends" and "pearls for your eyes" conjuring an image of a rotten corpse lying at the bottom of the ocean while simultaneously referencing Shakespeare.

Lyrics:

Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin' that the
City sleeps to hide

Let's swim out tonight love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive

Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
Surrender to the waiting worlds
That lap against our side

Nothin' left open
And no time to decide
We've stepped into a river
On our moonlight drive

Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
You reach your hand to hold me
But I can't be your guide

Easy how to love you
As I watch you glide
Falling through wet forests
On our moonlight drive, baby

Moonlight drive
Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride
Down, down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close

Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight
Goin' down, down, down...