Michael had intended Tall Tales to be a full instrumental album, but when he sent the 'finished' version of this song to his partner Andy Faunch for mastering, Andy asked if he might instead transform it into a vocal track. It took a few months for this reinvention to take form and to bring it all together into a cohesive prog track (especially all those vocals!), but he did get it there.
lyrics
+-+ Running Out (of Mysteries) +-+

farside streetlights solitaire moonlight
ashes embers glowing
windows dark to movement from view
statues shadows whispering

my feet hurt
from standing still
is there any chance
that I’m beginning to think that….

I’m running out of time
I’m running out of mysteries
and all the daydreams slipping, drifting further away

tactile  see-through open to view
want to run to see you
too far out of reach in the past in the deep
distant slide show imaging

wait a minute
hold on tight
is there any reason
and that I shouldn’t fight it…

I’m running out of time
I’m running out of mysteries
and all the daydreams slipping, drifting further away
 Ooooooh!

I’m running out of time
running out of mysteries
and all the daydreams slipping, drifting further away

I’m running out of time
running out of mysteries
and all the daydreams slipping, drifting further away way way way way…

I’m running out of time
I’m running out of time
I’m running out of time
I’m running out of time…

Running Out (of Mysteries)

And now for something completely different! If you heard where this song started as compared with where it landed, it would not be recognizable to you.

All told, Western Skies went through around 70 different versions (and several different titles as well!). Some versions were much longer (the longest clocked in at about 8 minutes!), while other were shorter (barely 3 minutes) as it wound its way along. It is now 5:46 in length, and feels right right there.

The song started off with a string arrangement to be the main feature of the track, but it never really settled in, so Michael threw out the idea of involving strings at all for several months while he continued work on the piece. More changes came to the inner workings of the song, back and forth, back and forth, with Michael adding a new guitar part over here, changing a bassline over there, some congas came in... and soon it seemed like there might be plenty of room for those strings after all, and from that point forward the string arrangement nearly wrote itself.

Michael worked over the arrangement in his good friend Frank Joseph's fjmuzic studio (with some excellent MIDI strings Frank had, the IK Multimedia Miroslav Philharmonik set... really, REALLY good stuff!), but in the end it was just apparent that MIDI-based strings would not cut it for this song, so Michael reached out to a young cello player in Croatia named Martin Kutnar (https://martinkutnar.com) to perform the string parts with his SESSION STRINGS STUDIO players.

Working from Michael's arrangement, Martin pulled his wife and sister together to complete the 'string quartet' (Martin played cello, his wife Katarina appears on viola and violin, and sister Jelena on violin), and from their home studio in Croatia they provided the amazing string quartet you hear on this piece, a first for Michael, both involving real strings in a piece as well as utilizing musicians from Croatia! The interwebs can be fantastic sometimes...

Michael McClure