16 posts tagged “lyrics”
Worked at the office until 6.
Had dinner with my father afterwards.
Came home, had invited a lot of people over, a handful came by.
My roommates got me my lone gift, but it was quite magnificent (deserving of its own post at some point).
It's one more gift that I'm used to getting.
Drank good beer. Had good laughs.
Took one of the girls to get a post-midnight cheeseburger.
Been sitting here alone for the past half-hour, continuing to drink my good beer and listening to Say Anything.
Because really, this is possibly one of my better birthdays.
They're usually terrible.
Also, this marks four years to the day I've been single.
Music and lyrics because even though I fancy myself a writer, Beamis does it better:
It is my birthday. It is a new year. I should be happy that I am still here.
Light up a new joint. Put on an old shirt. Try to remember but forget how my brain works.
But I could read a book a night before this year.
I knew every word, their definitions clear
But now in stealth I check thesaurus -- it's become my guilty mistress.
So I heave my breath at burning wax because I know that spark ain't coming back.
It is my birthday. I've got all my friends here.
They haven't been talking as of lately. They've all found new bro's and babies.
I have smoked away my pride.
There is nothing but the cinders of it inside.
But I believed in more than nothingness last year and under every quiet failure it's still here.
Buried breathing under 18 years of tragedy and fear.
If I could crawl my way out of this grave just think of all the time I'd save.
The stereo's playing the same old songs and we still hum along
And in no time we'll be spread across the earth,
Donning business suits to show the faceless master what we're worth.
From our Huggies to Armani and it all seems so rehearsed.
She said, "I can't get laid in this town without these pointy fuckin' shoes. My feet are so black and blue, and so are you."
- Say Anything, Woe
There's been a noticeable lack of writing on my end. Life has produced nothing new to document and the churning tempest that is my mind has refused all attempts to map its geography. The swell and crash of emotions against the shore of my ego has beaten down the craggy inlets and raised the threat of coastal flooding. I feel like I am staying afloat with only the most threadbare life jacket and a tenuous lifeline, thrashing and beating against the water in futile, flailing movements against the inevitable.
I find myself in a minority that continues to grow smaller by the day. The eternal third-wheel, always the extra baggage on any outing with friends or family. Years ago my friends and I would have laughed at the idea of more than a few of them being wed, with the majority of bets being placed on myself to fall to the ball-and-chain first. Now, here in the present, I am the only one who is not either married or well on their way to that destination. There's a slight agitation in me for the situation being what it is, though I cannot say that I am not just the least bit jealous.
Three years and two months I've been single. The longest period of time since I was fifteen that I have not had a significant other in my life. A length of time that has seen a number of my friends grow and change and accept and embrace positive changes in their lives. I have seen a number of friends married in that time. I have found myself with more and more time spent alone. Related changes? Perhaps. The fact that the longest period of my own singleness happened to fall when most of my friends found their own significant others has not helped, though really I cannot begrudge anyone or anything save the planetary alignments for this particular fault.
For all that has happened, I have been granted a goodly deal of time to spend with myself, mulling over the particulars of my personality and actions. I've dissected myself time and again looking for answers, checking the cadaver of my past carefully, examining each scar and bruise as if they will reveal some great truth. I've learned... well, to say a great deal would be a lie. I've never been terribly deluded about myself, who I am, or the faults and flaws I exhibit. I am more keenly aware of them than ever, though. They stand out blindingly like snow-white scar tissue on the dermis of my being.
I've been listening to my collection of Tom Waits albums recently. That man's grave, rough, worn voice is as similar to the sound of my own thoughts inside my head as I have found. There's such a breadth and depth to his catalog of music that I can always find something to fit my mood(s).
"Well, the night does funny things
inside a man,
these old Tom-cat feelings you don't understand."
- Hope I Don't Fall In Love with You (1973)
"Nobody, nobody,
will ever love you the way I could love you.
'Cause nobody, nobody is that strong."
- Nobody (1975)
"Don't you know there ain't no devil, there's just God when he's drunk."
- Heartattack and Vine (1980)
Death Cab for Cutie's new album releases today. I've been listening to a copy I "found laying around somewhere on the internet" all evening/morning. It's dark and haunting and arguably the best thing they've ever produced. In keeping with lyrics and songs that are matching up to present situations and my own internal emotional turmoil that I have yet to discuss with anyone, one of the tracks does an excellent job of summing up my own feelings towards a particular someone.
I’m starting to feel
We stay together out of fear of dying alone.
I’ve been slipping through the years.
My old clothes don’t fit like they once did,
So they hang like ghosts of the people I’ve been
And it’s like my heart cant contain.
I fall in love every day.
And I feel like a fool,
But I have to face the truth that
No one could ever look at me like you do.
Like I’m something worth holding on to.
There’s times I think of leaving,
But it’s something I’ll never do.
Cause you can do better than me,
But I can’t do better than you.
You can do better than me,
But I can’t do better than you.
- Death Cab for Cutie, You Can Do Better Than Me (but I Can't Do Better Than You)
Also of note are Cath... and I Will Possess Your Heart. I highly recommend "finding" a copy or otherwise finding a copy to purchase.
Words. Words could be written here trying to explain myself, but all would fall short of the glory and brilliance of my insanity. The gloriousness of my descent into madness is not for the tongues and speech of men, but rather is to be committed to memory and whispered in hushed tones in days yet to come.
In lieu of my own words, a selection of tones written by other men, more handsome men, than myself:
if you wanted to be free.
There's one thing you need to know,
and that's that you can't count on me."
that's when I knew that I could never have you,
I knew that before you did.
Still I'm the one who's stupid,
and theres this burning, like theres always been.
I've never been so alone, and Ive never been so alive."
I know...I can't keep it all together,
And there's a memory of a window.
Looking through I see you,
searching for something I could never give you.
And there's someone who understands you
more than I do."
Lou is bugged and shot up with drugs.
He sweats this bird he hardly knows.
All that he wants is to see someone he respects without their clothes.
So like some hybrid mother/lover she’d soothe and heal his wounds
And kiss those dying ears so softly that the reaper stops to swoon.
- Say Anything, Yellow Cat/Red Cat
Don't know why I can't sleep.
Spent the evening revising and rewriting my resume.
Briefly spoke to my mother.
I'm completely uncertain in what I am doing. I have a freelance writing job that I've been dragging my knuckles on. I need to pick up and finish it out, mail it out, and get it printed. I need another vehicle. It's not a want at this point. After the last mechanical hiccup I'm getting ~230 for a $80 fill-up. No possibility I can keep that up. Tomorrow/today's my last day of class, with a final to follow a week from then. I've got an 8 page essay due on Friday, which must reference at least 4 sources, on the topic of the reverence of masculinity and nationality over religion and piety in the 1600's. I'm just glad to be done with this course. I'll be glad to be done with school for the time being.
I've run myself too hard for too long and burned out along the road. I've coasted to where I am now, but there's no momentum left. I'm on a long, dry patch of interstate with no downhill slopes to ride. It's time to overhaul this monsterous meat-wagon I call a body and put rubber to asphalt once more.
Rated R by the Queens of the Stone Age is still one of my favorite albums, 8 years after it's release.
I'm fond of pretty much everything they've done, as well as the other artists they've helped create/bring forward.
(Eagles of Death Metal, Foo Fighters [who helped Queens of the Stone Age initially].)
I think you already know
how far I'd go not to say.
You know the art isn't gone
And I'm taking my song to the grave.
- Queens of the Stone Age, The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret
A nice, quick vivisection of my personality put on display in those lyrics.
Several past lovers and a number of friends have commented that my eyes can be unsettling at times.
They've made the assessment that they are too dark and that you can never tell what I am thinking.
I happen to take great pride in that trait.
It's something I revel in.
My mouth betrays me at times, but my eyes never lie.
In fact they say nothing.
"When I find out all the reasons maybe I'll find another way, find another day. With all the changing seasons of my life maybe I'll get it right next time. And now that you've been broken down, got your head out of the clouds, you're back down on the ground and you don't talk so loud, an you don't walk so proud any more."
- Guns 'N Roses, Estranged
I've been listening to Use Your Illusion I and II for the past few hours. I've mostly been thinking about my birthday and how I don't feel nearly as old as I am and how it seems only yesterday that I listened to one of these albums every night. I remember falling in love with Use Your Illusion II from the moment I first listened to it. I remember I got it for Christmas in 1992, 3 months after it had come out. I had this boombox CD player in my room and every night when I would go to bed I would put in the disc and let it play on repeat, the opening quote borrowed from Cool Hand Luke leading me into the night. some nights I'd hear more of the album than others, but it became a comfort to me. On the nights when my parent's fighting would echo through the house I'd make it through all 75 minutes and hear that quote again. It was perhaps one of the first rituals I developed to cope with my home life and my own mental issues.
Estranged
was one of the strangest songs to me at the time, but also my single
favorite from the entire album. There was something about it I could
not pinpoint that made something inside me a bit calmer, a little more
manageable. I found solace in the song's opening lines,
It was the first time since the death of my great-grandmother that I could directly relate parts of how I felt to someone else. The song's overall theme of estrangement and abandonment was akin to a blanket I wrapped my psyche in during that winter, which was the last and worst in my parent's failed marriage. Upon each listening I was reminded that someone else had felt things similar to what I was experiencing at that time.
"When you're talking to yourself, and nobody's home you can fool yourself. You came in this world alone."
There were parts of the song I couldn't relate to at the time. I was 11 and did not have the life- and world-experience to understand the emotion behind some of the lyrics. Over the years, I have returned to it time and again with new eyes and an older heart and the lyrics reveal something new to me. I'm not sure why I chose to listen to Estranged tonight. I had iTunes open and it just came to mind. As I heard the lyrics that old feeling washed over me and the words were musical truth once more. I once again found part of myself in a song that for 15 years has served as an odd marker.
"Old at heart but I'm only 28, and I'm much too young to let love break my heart. Young at heart but it's getting much too late to find ourselves so far apart."
"Another head aches, another heart breaks.
I am so much older than I can take.
And my affection, well it comes and goes.
I need direction to perfection, oh no no no no.
Help me out."
- The Killers, All These Things I've Done
I was looking at some pictures of an event this evening and realized how much difference there is in living and being alive. I am living, breathing, working, and dying now. I am not alive. There was something so beautiful and maddening in the frustration and growth that I found in Baton Rouge. I need more of that in my life. I need more people like Kristin and Wendell and Mary and T-dog and B-man. I need Wine and Cheese parties and drag shows and sushi and photography and adventure.
I need to find whatever it was I left behind in Baton Rouge.
"When the bus shelter windows and napkin dispensers surprise,
with distorted reflections it's never the someone you're hoping to recognize.
And the rent is too high living here between reasons to live,
where you can't sleep alone and your memories groan and the borders of night start to give.
When you (when you) can't save cash or conviction you're broken you're breaking a tired shoelace or a wave.
So long past past-due, a new name for everything.When the runways collude with the map that you folded wrong,
and the route you abandoned is always the path that you probably should be upon.
When the bottle-cap-ashtrays and intimate sears are all full
with results of your breath and the threads of your fear are unfurled with the tiniest pull.
One more time try
stand with your hands and your pockets and stare at the smudge on a newspaper sky
and ask it to rain a new name for everything.Fire every phrase.
They don't wanna work
for us anymore.
Dot and dash our days,
make your face the flag,
of a semaphore.All you won't show.
The boxes you brought here and never unpacked are still patiently waiting to go.
So put on those clothes you never grew into
and smile like you mean it for once.
If you come back bring a new name for everything.A new name for everything ...
A new name for everything ...
- The Weakerthans, A New Name For Everything
Love this band.
Love this song.
Wish I didn't feel like I do now.
Acknowledged but unloved.
There's something distinctly wrong with the combination of those two emotions.
