Proof of Life
00:00
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03:46
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1. |
Go Gently
04:23
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It used to be, a song,
Once recorded, could live forever
A line to the remote evermore
But it starts to feel absurd
Writing notes to a bankrupt future
Like paper airplanes launched at the sun,
A conceit of hope vs. numbered days
And what if this ends up our world’s last gasp?
The good behind us, left to fight over scraps
It’s alright
It’s ok
Leave me where I lay
To agonize over words no one hears,
The floral language used to catalog fear:
-Abandonment
-Feeling fake
-Rejection and snakes
Combine them and shake
Temporary, though, as all this may be
Powerless, sure, but at least I’ve got me
And you’ve got you -
We’ve got us -
I hope that’s enough.
Remember me,
Remember us.
Oh - It’s only a song
But who’s left to hear it?
Oh it’s just a song
And we’re just it’s keepers
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2. |
Proof of Life
03:46
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There's a voice that won't use words
& I guess I've got a lot to learn
Apologize for all the things I should've said
I was sure that you'd have known
& kept them to myself
Watched the world fall from your eyes,
Replaced by fear or longing, sometimes both
Time to time, I wonder if I'll get it back,
In the pain of waiting years,
I move against the tide
All those stupid half-made plans I had,
They never seem to work out right
A million useless songs
Give voice to what went wrong
& I don't wanna hide,
I guess just not be found, at least for now
The sun goes down hazy on a slate-gray night
And charcoal clouds move to block the moon
The last star in our sky
Illuminates our eyes
& serves as proof of life,
I think, at least for now
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3. |
Mountain Laurel
03:58
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Will I see the storm before the wind picks up?
Will I finally get it right?
Well, I don't stand a chance if I brave the night,
Alone and burrowed in
Sleep outside to see the skies
As all that's green around me dies
I'm not one to hypothesize
It can't be a good sign at all
All overgrown with bittersweet &
Mountain laurel, eventually
A pretty tangle of defeat,
A poison path, a wilted memory
If I can't see the moon through the evergreens,
I'll hold tight, just trust it's there
And if there's not a sun to light our summer sky,
Well I guess we'll know the dark
If I don't return then plant a tree &
Lay some flowers at its feet
Inscribe a plaque that says "Finally Free,
It Always Sucked Here Anyway"
I hope to hell or god above
There's something to keep dreaming of
Peripheral, but never loved:
A background noise or writing on a wall
When there comes a day where all lights dim low
And the sands of time lay still,
I won't need to know how it all unfolds
If the wind stays at our back
We're all terrified of the lives we've got,
In the shadow of our fate
And we may never glimpse the unknowable,
In darkness or beyond.
No, I don't have a place where those fears can lie,
So you'll see them time to time.
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4. |
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If you don't like how you look, you don't have to look
There are no mirrors if you keep your head down
You see, I keep conversational with the cat
Or at least a check-in when no one's listening
She says, "I'll tell you how this place really works -
The world gets smaller as you get older, and
Gravity doubles when the days get dark enough,
And you're feeling heavy with the lights out"
So I listen from the floor,
Gone is any past grandeur
And all those years, they pour ashore
Where I'd felt a failure before
The words embedded in the hallway of my mind
Like a post-it note found in a friend's apartment
Said, "You can run nearly til your legs fall off,
But what you run from will stay right behind you.
You can drink, smoke, or medicate thoughts away,
But they're still waiting, sharpening their teeth" so,
If you can’t stand your own voice you don't have to sing.
There'll be no more sad songs if you won't write them
And it's ever-darkening,
And the plot gets lost again
Under weight, any branch bends,
With luck it'll keep from giving in
It's kinda strange, but I can't turn the page
I'm sure that there's more -
Can't imagine it ends mid-sentence
But I think
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5. |
Absolutely Nowhere
02:45
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Awake, and feeling bad
Toss & turn & drift off,
Jolt awake in sweat
When you feel your heartbeats over the noise of your thoughts
And you just can’t shut them up,
The fear can last the night through, laying terrified
But there’s nothing I love
More than nothing at all
So close I felt to death,
It kinda warmed me to life -
All being relative.
Felt my skin melting off from the light of the sun
Coming in through the shades
It’s the only side effect, but it’s a fucking lot
There’s nowhere I’d rather be
Than absolutely nowhere
So take that pill, or maybe spit it out
Try to convince yourself you’ve got it figured out
Put it out of your mind - Everyone has their time
So climb that wall to see the other side
Nearly kill yourself trying to decide
Trying to decide where you’ll come down
I guess it’s not my day
I guess it just hasn’t been
For a couple decades or more
When the body wants what the mind can’t override
And the night takes it’s grip
In these familiar haunts where we all come to die -
If it starts to feel like home,
It’s cuz it’s all that you’ve known
I took that pill, it didn’t help a bit
I climbed that wall, both sides were shit
I put it out of my mind. We’ll find home in time.
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6. |
Larks Swarm a Hawk
04:24
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Don't mean to let you down and disappoint
I get it, I also can't stand my voice
Never expected that there'd be a tomorrow,
Still caught up on all of my yesterdays
Stumble over every stupid thought
I gave them words and always spoke them wrong
Tied up in silence like some mountain peak,
A view I saw one time, but can't seem to find again
Got to feeling like a setting sun,
Sick of myself and so uniquely dumb,
Still tired from being born
I'll be like water, taking any shape I'm told
Any container, ice tray, rivulet, or bowl
No, water doesn't get to choose the path it flows
But given time, no one wins cause water works to erode
Maybe I'll still be here in the morning
Maybe I just need a little time
Sorrow's not the simplest thing to hold, though
I guess at least it's something I can own
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7. |
And Yet
02:24
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It felt as graceless as the sound of the wind beating flat on the pines
As the rains blanket sideways on the window, feeling hopeless inside
Oh, it's been a long time
A painfully long time
It seemed as pointless as have most of my nights tracing maps in a storm
You can push against the tide all you want, still asea by the morning
Oh, it's a hard wind
And you can't avoid it
It's just how it is
I left here in a dream on the wings of a black crow
It flew me to the moon and I looked at the earth below
Surprisingly, I could see the window to my room and I thought, "well, fuck"
And as aimless as I've ever been, I returned to this bedroom
Waking from a fever dream into something so much worse
Oh, you'll never know, though,
Where all of your years go
In a lonely life spent waiting for someone to let you in
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8. |
Unreliable Narrator
04:36
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Where did all my best years go?
When'd I get so old?
Dried on the vine
You can try to will heartsickness gone,
Cure it with a song,
Some old tragic tune
that goes:
"Life is bad, at least it's short"
Then repeats in the second verse:
Yeah, living's bad, at least it's short
I'm still looking for my arc,
Some kinda narrative
I guess I'm aging like an uncorked wine,
Bitter to the taste,
And no longer fucks you up
The weather's bad and getting worse,
I'll wait it out on your front porch
No, I can't spend more time inside,
Trying to fall asleep or die
I'll narrate unreliably
The reasons to leave town,
Cross country, overseas
Everyone here has some kinda dream
That takes up so much space,
Crowding out what's real
Blurry-eyed and left to fate,
I’ll chase it down some interstate
I may find something of my own,
Maybe, through dumb luck,
I may not - who can say?
Is this a fever dream, or maybe something in between?
Is this a burden I can bear?
And maybe if someday I end up somehow half ok,
I'll hope to God to meet you there
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9. |
All Things Aside
04:13
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All things aside, I feel fine
I guess at least some part of the time
Stoned and alone, my eyes reflect on my phone
Like a box wine supernova in the sky
Of all the lives I could've lived,
I somehow ended up stuck with this
It's a hall of mirrors and I've lost my way,
So many doors and none are unlocked
"Sorrow aside, I'm alright,"
I repeat it to myself day and night
But when all that you see is just the shit you can't be,
I guess you start to feel like closing your eyes
And imagine a welcoming void,
The inevitable is hardly a choice
With a humbling look in the rear-view
At the encroaching fate you'd hoped to avoid
It's a thing I drag behind me though, mostly got used to the weight
And if I try to make the best of it, if I see the dark abate,
No, I'm not exactly built for this, but maybe built to phone it in
Every mirror that I walk past, I think "Oh, Christ, not you again"
Stammer trying to explain it away
And if you can't tell that I'm bluffing, then hey -
If it can buy me some time for you to think that I'm fine,
I'll keep my panic to myself one more day
Well, time makes an ass of us all,
It's a remarkably embarrassing crawl
Only nature can haunt the ways we wish we could haunt,
As we try to will away our own ghosts
But all that aside, I feel fine
Though at times, I think I'm losing my mind
There's not a drug they'd prescribe that's able to override
The drive to darkness, to some starless black night
And sadness aside, what remains?
The intention or the damage sustained?
The way the words fall short of their quarry,
The way my memory's bound to trap me in time
And all the shit I can't explain, it swarms around me in my sleep
When you can't make out a single star from the expanse that stretches deep
You wonder, in it's enormity, where the meaning actually lies
And if there's not a cloud up in my sky, it's cuz I kept them all inside
All things aside, though,
It's getting late, so,
Bullshit aside, friend,
I think we know how this ends.
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10. |
Catalpa Bloom
02:37
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Depressing light in a tragic room
What goodness comes is then gone too soon
It's as ephemeral and brief as a catalpa's bloom
And though I may know my way around,
I'm just a tourist in my own town
Familiar as it may be, it's sure not home
No, I'm not sure what it wants from me
Other than something that I can't be
I'm too old to die too young, though I’m too young to stay
So you can go out and have a beer,
Get in your car and just disappear
Like a ghost that haunts this dump but knows to not stick around
Spent a couple years sober, I'm glad that that's over,
I finally feel more like myself
Cause being cloudy of mind helps the darkness pass by,
You might even mistake it for light
Whiskey away the boredom, the pain
I've got a date with disaster, she haunts me at every turn
She'll fuck me up, then unfuck me up
She never turns off the lights when she leaves, & the door's left ajar
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11. |
Weird Weather
05:06
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All these drastic swings in weather
Come on so sudden, so extreme
You recollect sunstroke or deep-freeze,
But I remember in between:
Those fragile moments
In nature's balance
Seem to foretell the unknown
Looks like we're in for some
New kinda darkness that
Might not let up, might stick around
Some clouds won't burn off in the sunlight,
Sometimes they linger, undefined
They might connect with something bigger,
The universal - something real
By mid-October I hoped
The sky would open at last
The rain would beat on my windows
With luck, I'll sleep through it
Through late November or til
Maybe October again
I've waited so long and hoped against hope
To glimpse the other side
I tried to find warmth amid nosebleed cold
But i only saw the ice
The thaw's coming in time,
And may rain wash away
The burrows we hid among
Like lightning alight,
A dust or a droplet,
In bloom or a swift decline
What the fuck happened here?
Intentions missed by a mile.
Where is our gentler world?
If clouds won't break or move,
The rain'll blanket down,
I'll be the dam that gives way
If I can't run from it,
I'll be the town down below,
Make peace, goodbye, see you soon
I know someday will come,
But this time I lived through it
Though I keep thinking I won't
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12. |
For Luna
02:10
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Water Street, 3 am, my mind adrift again
I’d like to write a perfect line, to leave some permanence behind,
To try to right all vaguely wrong from the shelter of a song
And end it on a perfect thought -
It may be this, but likely not.
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