1. |
Dystopian Bump
01:54
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2. |
Age Of Reason
03:19
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Has anybody seen my wife
She’s got a dollar or two of mine and I’m without a dime
But ah well now, she’s probably already spent it
Could you tell the taxman that for me
I’m sure he’s more inclined to agree with you
Unless it’s your door he’s knocking on next
Well it took them a good ten years to catch up to me
But it’ll take more guns than that to put me down in the ground
More taxes on my head to lay my burdens down
Thirty and seven months pregnant
With a man who ain’t of my dreams but he’s honest and he’s ageing well
And my job placates me, or so it seems
But oh, once I lived and oh, how I lived
In the cities of the world
Getting by on looks and occasional crooks who would
Throw five down for a drink with a girl
But darkness on baby’s birthday gives rise to the hegemonic cry
Oh wonder oh wonder, oh what’s the use
When nothing lays ahead but a few new ways to die
There’s only so many fights that a man can lose before he’s bound to give up
Only so many times that a woman can try till she knows that it’s never enough
Only when every corner of western thought is kicked while they’re down in the back
Will we come to understand there is too much to ask
So fathers don’t let your children grow up to be cowboys like you
Too cussed to live and too mean to die
And holding onto fear like reason
Though you’ve long lost the reasons why
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3. |
Songwriter Death Trip
04:23
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The moon is sitting low
Barely peeks above the trees
The wind is howling, howling
Howling long way from a breeze
I can’t help but feel so paranoid
With it all whirling round me
That’s why the Greeks made gods in the stars and
Joan of Arc burned for free
The highway signs quiver
Throwing phantom lines
Bumps in the pavement throw my chassis around
Playing tricks upon my mind
It’s late October now and don’t you know
I hear the howls and cries of demons and wolves as
Gods and men hold each other intent on
Being the last to fall
Working on a working title
For the last song you sang
Speeding along the pot-holed ground
Outrunning the ghosts and the pain
Born of occupier’s blood
I must inhabituate in the flood as though
I watch myself from myself
I see it’s not good and good is not enough
When something ain’t right
Something in the air
You’re burning through gas that’s
Eating the cash you don’t have
But you don’t care
Cause there’s something bigger than you
Might be a comfort if only it didn’t
Make the hair on your neck stand up and
Catch you when you’re down and lonely
See the eyes that shine
They look so alive
What more could you want
From a death such as time
Well it’s one eye over your shoulder and
One hand on your heart
One chance to get it right after you’ve rehearsed the part
But you don’t have to say
That you’re bound to fail
When the devil’s got you by the tail
No you don’t have to say
When you’re bound to fail
That old devil’s got you by the tail
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4. |
Perennial Bloom
06:23
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Legendary bush pilots
Sports fans for the love of the game
Relics of the past, faceless forgotten names
These days Frankie waits
For a man who shoots more than blanks and
Johnny writes cheques to cover the lawyer’s gains
I guess they wouldn’t care
What you’d choose to call your own
But to have another crack at it, would they choose to grow
Wolf hunting from a helicopter
Witch burnings, lynchings and wars to kill off the poor
If you ain’t feeling sorry
I’ll give you something to feel sorry for
With church doors locked nowadays
Corpses wash up on uncaring waves
It’s a funny thing – a line on a map
I pledge allegiance to this or to that
Disturbed by a spot of light
You won’t get a nod tonight
You wait, eyes burning and ready for flight
Come comrades, let us weed our minds
Sky’s too red
Take it down and paint it blue
Good luck, sing the children, perfecting the hue
Dead relatives cry and it falls like rain as they
Turn ‘round in their graves
You look on down swearing ‘I ain’t gonna go that way’
But would you wait and wait
As waiting is the greatest sin of a slave
It’s not that life don’t have nothing to offer
But too much to take away
I guess you wouldn’t care
What they’ll choose to call their own
But to have another crack at it
Would you choose to grow
In the evening with everything kissed
In a warm pink light
It causes me sometimes to stop and think
Hell, maybe we’ll get things right
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5. |
Domesticated
04:19
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What happened to you sickle moon
You used to loom so large, perched on the horizon
Now you’re diminished by the stars
Hanging there in the middle of the night sky without a friend
Makes a man want to bring on home his head in his hands
The folk singer sings to an empty room his lonesome songs
A couple in the corner are making noise but they ain’t singing along
Another show for the books and I guess this one goes to say
Just call him a singer-songwriter
These songs ain’t for the folks anyway
Piano lady introduced a song she could not explain
She told me it was a boogie-woogie ballad with a honty-tonk refrain
But it sounded more like the stolen words from a long-forgotten, foreign bet
When she said she’d come from the city tonight
And do you have a Native cigarette
Outside your window the coyotes have started howling
The dumpster is getting filled with trash and your neighbours have gone out prowling
For yesterday’s promise of tomorrow’s cash
With a lightning rod
I thought it couldn’t get no worse till they said
Cash ain’t king, it’s god
They’re no different than the thugs and the scabs and the cops that we’ve always had
Who would pick you up and shake you down and drop you just as fast
The spoiled youth of a spilled seed
We’re slave to ingrained sense of greed
We all want to die easy but this stubborn life precedes
Do you deem yourself alive, or awake in a nightmare
Well now, who controls the strings decides
How and when those strings will wear
It must be what’s roaring through the blood of a young man
That catches him in tortured throes of desperation and
What makes a head so heavy that it needs a loving hand
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6. |
Daddy
01:06
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7. |
Old Stock
02:17
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Old dogs using new tricks
To get their last chance
To get that vote fixed
To be the hand that feeds
Be the hand that beats
Those fuckers are knocking on every door
Running dogs as masked mailmen
To up their price, call it
Workers’ compensation
Oh what, you didn’t know that?
Well now you do
Some men, nine-to-five
All they’ve got is a Saturday night
You say you’ve been down
Hell, if only you knew
Brother why are we kicking each other
I’ve got two boots with names on them
Our shoes ain’t ever gonna get filled
By the likes of those few
It’s all fun and games
Till someone brings the guns and the fame
It’s not the goodbye that hurts so much
As all the things it made us say
Circle the grounds executioner
Tell me now what have you found
It’s nothing of mine, your simple life
But still there’s something foul around
They’ve drawn a line with the hand that feeds
Don’t wince when the other comes down
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8. |
Deporter
05:36
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Notes from the back of an empty room
Tell me all I needed to know
About how to send a song to my baby back on home
I gaze upon with my eyes but not my mind
Smiles covering up domestic crimes
The crow may be ugly but he’s king of the goddamn pines
In between the smiles and the ugliness we find
I do believe we’ve met a couple times
Kiss me on unceded land
Show me love in the face of
A truth I could never understand
A truth I could never understand
A lie that will never be enough
There is someone inside us who is born with a knowledge of the blood
When they crack then we’re fucked
Cause it sure won’t be another
Twenty hundred years for the fires and the floods
Of a godly exhibition mowing us down in the rush
Show to me the colours of your skin
Tell me what they mean
Apply the words like fingers dipped in kerosene
Borrowed words, gestures in a tongue we ought to know
But honey tell me
Are those the same words you use when you’re praying in the fold
They took our heroes and chained them to a god we didn’t know
So to rob us with our good eye closed
Flat-sawn nightmares of the tall-topped trees now come to me with
Strange familiarity
I ain’t coming home till I’ve found the real thing
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9. |
Flowers On A Beer Can
05:02
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He wore his passion in his pockets
And his head like a whispering crown
Someday you swear you’ll be lifted up by the same things
That are keeping you down
This hard land will make you out of a man
And cast you out into the throng
The pleasures are few, though they’re simple but I know
It’s the lows that are heavy and long
The sun and the moon’s daily showdown
Ended with no surprise
Brother, you know not to put your damn money down
When it’s a draw every damn time
Babe, if you’re reading this I smashed every window
In the house and broke all the glass I found
And I burned the shop right on down to the ground
After drinking every last bottle down
Be less a fool if I did, but a liar if I said
That I’d considered the natural laws
When I hedged my bets on a drive into town
Counting on being guided by the wings of a dove
I guess there’ll always be another driver
And there’s no telling what they’re gonna do
And sometimes that curve comes a little too fast
And that rock wall is headed straight for you
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10. |
New Stock
03:43
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Boom and bust
Another fool’s gold rush
And they’re gonna do it all again in north Ontario
Where the Indians roam
But don’t call them that today
I guess the name change is gonna make it OK
As they line up the next dead souls to come and go
Unnatural predators
Wild and wooded and unwilling pastures
Hard pressed for a fight to the death that could end any faster
Put your money down
Put it where I'll find your mouth
Cram it till you choke but don’t you dare spit it out
All the while I’ll be there asking
Hey, how do you like it now
The bloodletting has got to take its form
If I gotta suffer alone, what am I suffering for
The natural world, the walmart superstore
The plastic trash, the iron and the ore
We’ll give our children sacred objects for
To cut them on their palms when they reach out for more
Just as my father cut off his arm
And handed it down gratefully
He said “here son, now this is yours
It’s no longer good to me”
We in turn will give our children ordinary names and
Dream stationary dreams and lose at all the same games
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Hophorn Hornbeam Ottawa, Ontario
Country/rock/folk/music. The familiar and the unknown.
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