1. |
Salad Daze
04:14
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Front lawn living rooms
Porch fires
Ash and astro turf
A deposit burned for conversation’s sake
Fake accents at after parties
Those actors may place our faces but
They’ll never know our names
The way my stories are stitched with all of yours
I still crave more
I remember the way I felt the day I left
Years bawling up inside my chest
Sadness and relief
Joy and disbelief
That somehow I had made it through
That I’d found something true at all
Worth cannonballing into
Leaving the life I knew in the rearview
Mirrors show our aging
Some things just stay the same
Chain smoked god-talks
Bottle rocket goodbyes
Ugly Houses hits
The orange lantern lit for all of Wells to see
New year’s toasts in New York City
In some stranger’s loft apartment
Before they came home and made us leave
So once again we took
To those cold but steady streets
Not everything was golden
That taught us that we are
Now that we’ve gotten older
I cherish every scar
Of our strung out salad daze
Long-lived glory nights
When we all felt alive
Time was on our side
There was nowhere else to be
But exactly where we were
Mixed up and confused
With nothing left to lose
Everything to gain
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2. |
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I can hear your secrets
Creaking through the floorboards
Thinking that they won’t be heard
By another lost soul
I’ve been drinking
That gets me speaking
So fast
Only gravity can slow me down
Pack my pipe to the brim
My sad attempt to quit the stix
Good habits hardly ever stick
But I sure do love being alive
I can taste excuses
Tighten up the noose
That’s been swinging around my neck
For thirty long years
They’re mistaken by giving me the slack to hang
I cut the rope and ran away
If this is what you deem “sin”
Then I suggest that you begin again
Open up your eyes
Give yourself a true view of being alive
HA HA
I know it’s just a lie I tell myself
To keep me moving through the haze of modern days
Flying south like winter wings
A treasure trove of tawdry things
Collected to try to share some piece of me
But wait!
Oh no!
I’ve not been lying under oath
They want us buried out of sight
Out of our minds
I have never been more right
More on time in all my life
You will have to pry
This truth from my
Cold dead gripping hands
and get rid of the evidence
Every step of my last dance
All the lines that I confessed
Every test I failed but don’t regret
Because they made me feel more infinite
And made me who I am.
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3. |
Night Shifts
03:37
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Called out from another night downtown
Like a job that drinks me 9 to 5
I don’t think I could take one more drunken conversation
That doesn’t leave me feeling any more alive
Than when I began to taste my spirit on the ledge of my tongue
Daring onlookers to cry, try to stop its jump
My mind freewheeled like Bob Dylan
Fighting through a free-willed free fall
Twisting towards my destiny
But we’ve all been taking night shifts
To keep our souls inside our skin
I’ve been having deja vu of my last breath again
Crawled out of another nervous break down
On the corner of confused suicide
Lost at least one among the rotten wreckage
None of us knew he was trapped inside
Once I got the word I lost the air from my lungs
Felt the pull of a cat’s cradle tighten up my gut
But I can hear him rolling on the wooden floors of Heaven
Laughing so damned hard it hurts
We’ve all been taking night walks
To feel you here with us again
We’ve been replaying
Night moves
Bar stools
Juke box
Still spinning
Life with every hit
That hurts like heaven
Turn it up to eleven
Send my regards to the next life
Someone’s gotta stay here
To carry on the light
To spit whiskey on the fire
Do my part to remind each weathered heart
That they are not alone.
You are not alone.
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4. |
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You’ve gotta come down from that mountain sometime
Face the forgotten that you tried to leave behind
Too obsessed with broken heroes
To not learn from their mistakes
But that doesn’t stop me stumbling all the same
Maybe that’s when I feel less insane
Working-class daymares eat the sunlight
When night creeps in my heart blinks on
Like a neon sign
So soaked in this moment
Silence trembles at my stand
I know where courage ends and fear begins
I am not afraid of death’s disgusting grin
I keep humming this song that I found
Some fucked up beautiful sound
Stitched into my soul
Howling to get out
Copper taste of blood in my mouth
Clenched teeth keep the demons down
But the more I give in and let them all speak
I feel that buzz of being found
I spent Twenty-some completely odd years
Collecting my scattered self
Strewn throughout beat up books
Caught on un-featured films
That fill my dusty shelves
Now I’m holy.
But not holier than thou.
We are the words we speak
What we pretend to be
When we are locked up by ourselves
So take me as I am.
What I offer up to now
The catches in my breath
That despite what they seem
Will never slow me down
Shaky hands but solid spine
A strange soul living its prime
Ignoring dates and time
‘cause who the hell’s to say just when I am?
or where I go
tonight?
When I’ve got back roads,
Beach Slang,
A reason to be alive,
Truth caught in my throat,
A thorn stuck in my side
That I’ve gotta get out.
That we’ve gotta get out.
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5. |
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It’s been a battered decade since I lost track of the law
Packed my hope-sick suitcase
Slow kissed the track that I was on
A fine farewell to frail fragility
That junk was just too rich for me
And my blood
I finally crashed the habit of hating my reflection
Head on into dark days
That haunt my resurrection
Chalked in the outline of my past
I always thought those plans would have passed
But years and rain
Have played their games and
Washed the roads away
I never want to taste complacency
That lust turns to dust
In the Summer heat
Holiness sweats down my aching teeth
I can’t taste the quiet
Gotta
Run
Run run
Like the devil’s at my back
Spent a lotta
Sun
Stunned stutter seconds
Sifting through stolen stacks
Of time that still had structure
Before scripture lost its weight
Released my broken crutch but
Gained a new one in its wake
Became the blessed crux
Unlearned how to hesitate
For I am what’s to find
I am where to be
I am not afraid of things
I cannot see
Come what may
I’ll still be
This misanthropic misfit
Ever-burning with both ends lit
An omnipresent outsider
Offering a way out
Or a path in
To this glory casted stranger squad
Pure unbridled acceptance
The church of Roman candles and
Star-soaked situations
That scream like stereos on back roads
Taking the long way home
To hear that holy chorus we all know
To get as close to Heaven
As we’ll ever get to go
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the World Forgot Huntsville, Alabama
The World Forgot is the heart attack shooting me back into life.
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