1. |
Pangloss
03:44
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I’d believe you if you said we were already dead
There was no hope of rescue or return
I can see us plucked instead from the foot of our death bed
With nothing of a flourish or concern
Oh nothing packs a sting like a walk down our old street
And the memories of past lives so profane
I recall them when I sing in a morbid reckoning
Of the things I’ve lost and those that still remain
But the light will surely go
from everyone and everything you’ll ever know
From coast to burning coast, We are rendered flesh and bone
And unequivocally alone
But lie, and I’ll believe you
For one faint spark on a breathless night
I would trade you all the rest of time and everything I own
For one last kiss at the perfect time
I would forego all the peace of mind I’ve labored to know
I will wait and helplessly hope
Swallow my pride while choking on hello
I’ll remain until I know
That foolish kid has given up the ghost
But lie, and I’ll believe you
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2. |
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I’ve been out of touch with everyone I know
And compulsively alone
And, in as trite a way as it could ever mean,
This story is about me
And my identity calcified on screen
And the thought of all those dreams the infirm dreamers dream
For all the painful lessons we were forced to learn
For all the perfect places that we can’t return
For all our lies spoken out of turn
We will burn
In and out of sync with quiet and inertia
I trace patterns in the ink
When the brain is an absentee, the heart sees what it wants to see
And makes gold the lead of memory
I sold off all my time with lenses to the sky
Hoping I might find a way out of the mind
We are lost, unwitting pilgrims
In the impermanence of time
By the time we find our answers
We will have already arrived
(alright)
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3. |
The English Wishbone
03:24
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Rainclouds parting raked up the heaps of stars
In a summer fading quickly
Burning ozone lingered like heavy fog
And we stumbled down the sidewalk
Buzzing neon the dangling pocket watch
I was ripped from an amnesia
Doe eyed. Dreamstate. Phantasmagoria.
Swaying slow and cinematic
And we were young, fast friends and faster lovers
To know the night was to live in it forever
Sequined stardust sultry in retrospect
With a thin, tawdry nostalgia
Careless. Clumsy. Mishandled momentum.
In a box of tacky keepsakes
But I was young and flippant with a goodbye
So quick to shrug off there won’t always be a next time
I don’t really want to talk now, baby
I don’t want to think about it anymore
Sooner or later this will all start fading
We’ll have all the time we need to mourn
If I could ever turn the clock back, maybe
I could make it like we never met at all
And I could get around the slow decaying
Of knowing everything’s my fault
All regrets and unresolved suspense meet the same sad ends in time
So I’ll wait here till the coast is clear and you’re miles out of sight
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4. |
Unclaimed Graves
03:17
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The small laments are laid in unclaimed graves
Until none but the heaviest remain
A burden silhouetted in a sideways beam’s anemic light
The living severed from the life
I etched our names into the broad side of infinity
Never dreaming there was ever more than I could see
A billion chance collisions aggregated in a history
To be paved over in the street
Are you a small spark flashing in my brain
Or an old ghost rattling it’s chains?
Either way I’m remembering the way you always used to say
You’ve got to pick which ditch to die in take your lumps and walk away
The lost track of time carves a gulf in between
An eternal return and an exiled dream
So if it’s nothing to you, then it’s nothing to me
To pin the past upon the summer breeze
To land upon the earth you have to fly
Through towering black clouds against a massive purple sky
To be born again then you first have to die
So I headed west under cover of night
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5. |
The Rest Is Posthumous
03:01
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The line’s gone dead, the wind’s gone still, the trail’s gone cold
The walls came down, the mind it reels, the heart’s on hold
The rest is posthumous
Deserted miles of wasted light
Distended by encroaching night
A ration for the wolves
A monograph of mangled lies
I swear I swear I swear I tried
To spin this straw back into gold
The best intentions are buried between
The needles I say and the daggers I mean
The end of the world passed by with a whimper
No blood from the stone, each sin to the sinner
I won’t be coming back for you
I’m a shape drawn without a form
I’m a shade with no color shown
I’m surrounded and I’m so alone
A solitaire in crowded homes
I speak the language of the last year’s words
I reap the whirlwind of a heart unstirred
The first truth, always so absurd
The hell it goes on undeterred
The worst intentions are buried between
The depth of my pride and the skin of my teeth
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6. |
Maximum Entropy
03:48
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I drove home from your apartment
A pining fire in my chest
The early morning city’s silence
A backdrop to our dreams all laid to rest
Under wide starry skies
The shimmer signifies their ending in a universe expanding
Well I’m here and what am I?
But an appendage that can know it
Well they should’ve sent a poet
Cause I don’t find a meaning in the night
Ours is a jinxed antiquity
A collection of dismantled almosts
A knock in my heart as we cross paths again
So far away for being so close
And a gaffe to have ever been
A page randomly started and summarily discarded
Well I’m here and what am I?
An assembly of atoms
In the push and pull of matter
And lucky to have happened upon you
In another place, another time
We could fix an order to our fates all misaligned
If you’re around, if you don’t mind
Meet me before the world ends and say you’re doing fine
And I’ll be alright
And when I die mix me among the mortar
Eternalized in the monotony of order
Brick by ordinary brick in perfect lines
And I won’t mind the unraveling of space time
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7. |
Folly After Death
03:19
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I recoil at every detail
In recounting all the sighs I’ve exhaled
I piece together the tale
In the tidelines of the ships that set sail
With notes tucked into pockets
Under wipers
Between sheets or bike spokes
And every couplet I wrote
The ephemera of past lives
Plastic trinkets
Artifacts that I stole
To feed the candle I hold
I held my breath like folly chasing after death
Until the only thing that’s left to do was run
I bit my tongue until my mouth was full of blood
Til everything and everyone I knew was gone
Now Denver in winter dreams in a dull metallic blue
It blacks out the bravery I am forever overdue
But if even just one word of this barstool prophecy rings true
I’d like to watch the lights go out with you
I’d believe you if you said I was already dead
There was no hope of rescue coming through
I can purge my heavy head of the specters in my bed
But the only one I dream about is you
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8. |
Deep Fake
03:14
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We belong to a world in a fugue state
Are we the same? Were we ever here at all?
Blameless mice upon a treadwheel
Or willing cobblers to the boot hell
We belong to the shackles and the sprawl
And we live as we dream
Who are we to the church and the prison
Who are we to the pistons and the gears
The dividend increases
While all the lowly unwashed pieces
Fight for scraps, for prejudice and fear
And we live as we dream
I wanna shatter the whole damn world
But how we adore a constraint
I’d like to see us burned into the altar of history
But they won’t remember our names
So let there be a lightness in the way we walk away
Or we could begin again
I will contend somehow this time will be any different
But you won’t believe it
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9. |
Plastic Bottle Service
02:44
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I swill nostalgia cheap enough
To fill this plastic bottle up
So lacquered up with sap that I fall right into the trap
Of letting longing be enough
Our history is swallowed by the tide
Beneath a frozen city sky
And when the final troubadour has died
I hope you’re still laughing by my side
Thought we’d be chanting Ça Ira
Or up against some Fordist factory wall
But we pacify ourselves, we don’t need Mustafa’s help
And there’ll be no guillotine to fall
When history is swallowed by the tide
Beneath a frozen city sky
And when we find the doomsayers were right
I hope you’re still laughing by my side
And we will all go together when we go
Can’t say we don’t deserve it
Can’t say we didn’t know
And on a pale, pale horse we will ride real slow
Off into the dim blue hour glow
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10. |
My Blue Hour
04:02
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I find my answers in the fringes of the night
When the buildings in the distance barely hobble into sight
There was a certain reassurance in the early morning charm
Like the cruelness in the world could never do us any harm
And we watched the sun come up in our comfortable delusion
She said your name and I thought about our lives
Growing frail like fraying cables on the high strung powerlines
Stately, solemn crosses on the edge of our hometowns
They never deign to wonder who of us would stick around
But I will be born anew even if it is without you
I’ve been holding on the highest rung of a ladder that descends to total darkness
If I could just hold on and write you one more song
Maybe I could finally break that spell
And give you that long overdue farewell
I saw my future in a trapezoid of light
Arcing downward from a lamppost on a cold Chicago night
And the heat that radiates will melt the falling flakes of snow
Before they can land and dampen the sleeves of her winter coat
And we’ll breathe out our pasts like escaping apparitions
I could fill her ears with all I’ve lived to tell
But let’s be honest, be honest with ourselves
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11. |
The Jetty
03:37
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The sun never sets, it just sinks slowly out of sight
With the thump in your chest forever anchored to the light
The prairie crack and dries, but you had wider eyes
To head west
The baggage of place, the frigid water in your veins
The stone in your face, carved to relief by interstates
The colors in this town are buried in the ground
So head west
Lay it forever down to rest
The curse that kept you from your dreaming
Let the insistent die their deaths
With no forwarding address
Live forever heading west
How the highway lines stretch their open arms around the lowland soil
How the satellites dart across the sky and fall to miss the earth
The bloom from the rose rots away on the roadside
The signal to noise gets thrown off-balance over time
Don’t linger in the sound of the ghosts that stuck around
Just head west
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Elway Fort Collins, Colorado
Elway started back in 2007 as a drunken mess called 10-4 Eleanor. They released a few records under the old moniker before changing their name in 2010 after signing with Red Scare Industries. 3 LPs, 2 EPs, 500+ shows in 23 countries later, they are still a drunken mess. ... more
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