Download/Listen: Yellow
You have to know that Heaven chose
To wrap you up with our bodies close
Your hair, your skin, your neck, your chin
Your heart beating like a symphony
Yellow is the color around your back
Lovers in the eyes of a curious street lamp
The warmth, comfortable and torn
The wounds that hold us together
Your toes, your shoulder left earlobe
Your breath and mine intertwining
Yellow is the color around your back
Lovers in the eyes of a curious street lamp
Watching as the sheet slides down
Taking in your beauty now
Download/Listen: Allison
There’s a scarf on the carpet, a girl on the stage.
The way she goes is like a parade
Always making me smile when she’s jumping around.
Where are you found?
Allison, look in the sky and I can wonder where you are
Drinking a tall sangria.
On the horizon, the sky lies on the ground.
Somewhere between them is where Allison is found.
People painting a canvas of what they desire
With their days and you put yours
On the back of a bird and its flying to some exotic land.
Allison, look at the fireflies to see what they become.
Turing the darkest night to gold.
4 in the morning to the sands of Mexico.
Download/Listen: Still In Love
I caught you looking up. You smiled and looked away.
I wanted you so much.
They called it Summer love but we never gave it up.
Even though some things would change
You and I will always be the same
How did we get so close, every road we chose didn’t tear us apart
Though you were far away, I knew I’d see you again
Cause we are still in love, we are still in love
You had another man, I built the life we planned
But I couldn’t let it go.
You heard of where I was, then one morning you drove up
Even though some things had changed
You and I will always be the same
I had to think of something along the way
To keep me entertained
I thought about you, I thought about life, I thought about love
I know I’m a poet with a poker face, letting on
I’m unconcerned with the way you speak
When all you say means a great deal to me
You always have a question behind your smile
What would you know of me
From the moment I saw you
I wanted to tell you everything, but
All I can do is stick around and have a drink or two
Keep my distance and bite my tongue
I’m going on the instincts of one
So swept away
Then turned around by the games we play
Its so hard for me to explain
All these words are woven to touch your heart
They’re all I have when kisses don’t mean anything
On to the next week and forgot about me
With dusty little passages in paperbacks
That talk about the struggles of love
And the glories of war
But if I left love what the hell would I be fighting for
I know I haven’t been myself these days
But I never want to be someone you couldn’t take
It’s strange going back and reading these lyrics. It almost seems like a different person. I wrote them in the Fall of 2004. There’s not a whole lot to go into here. The shyness and lack of experience that caused me to write most songs on this album led me to write this one as well. I was caught up in a girl who had just gotten out of a long relationship, and I didn’t stand a chance. The main musical influence of this song is David Mead’s album “Indiana.”
Long day distant, a tired apartment in the city
Think of the girl with a face like a child’s
And a skin thick enough for the city
You might have heard this one
Well here it goes again
This whore who had a fondness for him
He tried so hard to keep her at the surface
Sleepless nights he lays back
In the sheets are wet its Summer
On the ceiling spills a light that’s
Meant for those who wish to come back
Everybody goes to sleep it seems
Thinking of the one that got away
Don’t stop run like the wind now
Don’t stop run like the wind now
She is nothing but painful
Don’t stop run like the wind now
Backstory:
I wrote this song in a crappy little apartment I shared with some friends in Atlanta, GA. The carpet was old. We had a roach problem. I’ll never forget opening the silverware drawer to find roaches crawling on the silverware. I’ll also never forget my friend shooting a roach in the glasses cabinet with his pistol that shot yellow plastic BBs. The roach seriously disintegrated. The girl in the song is just a girl at the time.
Download/Listen: California
Lyrics:
You can tell a bitter man by the way he drinks the scene in California
What happened to his hopes and dreams?
They’re realized in hopeless schemes in California
Everybody wants to be someone special someone free in California
Chasing what they’re wishin’
Wishing they were differrent
Well carry on my friend as long as you have the strength
You seem to say “My God, my God” with the look on your face
There’s nothing you can chase that won’t make you hate
What you wanted so badly
Well you’re on your way, the day is beautiful
I can see you from the second floor
There’s an orange in your jacket pocket
Cause its a long way for a man to walk it alone
A landscape so crowded you can’t find silence in L.A.
A whore unembarrassed dances on the corner to a tune
Now a singer takes the stage, a man who has smoked his whole life through
Most of the time he draws his breaths
And with the rest he says what he needs to
Insight:
Despite what you might initially think this song is not about me. I wrote it about some of the things and people that I’ve seen here in L.A.
I’ve been a boy since 17 separated by a set of strings
On this guitar, on this guitar
And then what happened early morn
21 passed to a notebook on the floor
It says Elizabeth I’m sorry
Things didn’t turn out how we thought they would before
A pocket of flowers dissolved, devoured
“A World Like Ours” a barricade
A satchel of resolutions traded for refrains
Elizabeth, you’ve been a girl since this began
To let you grow would be a sin to better days
Now just who am I trying to hide
You and me from the bitterness that’s left with us now being 25
You threw a towel on the floor
Spotted black from all the masks you’ve worn before
You wonder if life is only
That from body to eulogy goes history so let it be
Still
Looking in the mirror I can see her thinking of the day
You just wanted to go home but dad had gone away
So now you sleep around in hopes that he is found
Making mistakes in the superable way we carry on
You wouldn’t tell me if what they said was true
But that’s cause I know you
Your honesty with friends never was that good
It’s a shame you’re so tired so soon
It’s a shame I sit in my room writing just to deal with you
“Being 25″ is my quarter-life crisis song about dealing with adulthood. It talks mostly through the 1st verse of my tendency to write about problems rather than dealing with them, to write about desire rather than acting on it. The line “you threw a towel on the floor spotted black from all the masks you’ve worn before,” or the imagery of the line comes from having shared a bathroom with my sister, and sometimes seeing a towel on the floor spotted black from makeup. In the song though the line is referring to giving in, trying to figure out who you are as a person, etc
Wielding the acidic tongue for someone I gave up on last November
Stab them with my teeth ’cause I have nothing to believe in this December
Love to live though tear apart this life to find the prize that lives inside it
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen
Yesterday 3 women carried groceries on their head
Down a stone path imparting such a life as they have lead
Some alive though some instead will suck the life of everyman
Who they let dance upon their stead, so empirically fantastic
A small town would be quiet when the darkness shuts you in
If not for the stray dogs that would wander, they’re howling in the wind
Or the town square that is speckled with a mass of angry men
They are drunk again, they are drunk again
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen
January holds the key for people anxious for a chance resurfacing
And smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes at snowmen
About the lyrics
I wrote this in the early Winter of 2006 in the same month(s) that I wrote “Being 25.” I was transitioning from one job I hated to another I would come to hate and I knew it. The 1st 2 lines of the song references a period when I wasn’t as close with some friends as I used to be, in a time of year that can feel either the loveliest or the loneliest.
“Love to live….prize that lives inside it” comes from something I read. The article referenced a French philosopher or child psychologist who studied and wrote about children’s fascination with objects, but their deeper fascination to know what’s inside. Like an easter egg for example. Little kids are fascinated with the bright & colorful egg but are willing to destroy it to find out what’s inside of it. This made me think of the way some people exist, so in love with truth they abandon any chance of a peaceful or comfortable existence in search of truth.
The songs bridge is full of images that I came across while visiting my brother in Honduras during September, 2006. The line “smoke rises at 3am from cigarettes in snowmen” talks about my brother and I standing outside of his rented house in Honduras, smoking cigarettes and feeling indifferent & apathetic.
