Dust in the Wind Meaning: The Line Kansas Never Finished

Read Time:10 Minute, 38 Second Before it was a song, it was homework. Kerry Livgren of Kansas has said he was trying to get better at acoustic guitar, so he made up a fingerpicking pattern and ran it over and over, the way you run scales. His wife, Vicci, heard it and told him to make it a song. He did not think it sounded like Kansas. He wrote words anyway, played the rough tape for the band, and the room went quiet. Then somebody asked where this had been. The song was “Dust in the Wind.” Ask anyone the Dust in the Wind meaning and they can tell you. The title says it, over and over. What is harder to explain is why a song that says we amount to nothing has comforted so many people for so long. The answer is in how it was built. And it leads somewhere the song itself never goes. What Dust in the Wind is really about Kansas came out of Topeka in the early 1970s as an American answer to the big British progressive bands.

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