Music by Jason Hoopes and Damon Waitkus
Lyrics by Damon Waitkus

Lyrics

Walking late down Ocean Beach
trying to describe the feeling, waking up
to a grown man weeping in the street.

(Turned out to be a neighbor. His son had been
running blind for a few days and he’d just
got word from down South somewhere:
they’d found him.)

It was just a story for a hungry sea
but it stuck behind your eyes and lodged there
like the whisper of a spine
in that blind white worm inside.

Old friend in a hole at the back of my skull,
when you called I was sleeping.
God I confess I can’t really address
though I do talk to you.

In an alley in back of the pawn shop,
stashing your trash in a booted car.
Buying drinks for an exotic dancer,
following her home from the bar.
Sitting up in your room in the Tenderloin,
smoking hash in the hooded night,
the reel-to-reels against your inner wall are rolling,
tape his flooding from the phones like a searchlight.

And then you start to guard your tapes
and guard your private thoughts
from forming canyons under tiny streams of pain.
The people on the street seem to know too much.
Your friends seems to be messing with the records in your brain.

And from the back of my skull, a chain walks down
past flapping doors and singing wires,
past throbbing dynamos and factories,
past leeching pools and midden heaps,
past silos milking fertile rows
to the vestige of a story that I can’t outrun.

Well I heard you packed it in, but never where
or how, and that was enough to see you shuffling
down a staircase in another city, and another.
(Be careful lines have come down in the night,
the lights are out.)

Old friend in a hole at the back of my skull,
trying to cut out the bad part.
And I bit through the lead ‘cuz I won’t wake the dead,
though I do talk to you.

On Van Ness one night I felt your heavy arms take hold of me,
rough and loving like an older brother would,
as if to say “Look, I’m behind you now, don’t move,
don’t panic, and don’t turn around.
“In a minute I am going to let you go, and when
you go, you can go down Mission,
you can take the L down to the sea, buy yourself
a new microphone, lay down some city for me,
and though your heart is empty and full,” you said
“you will find a cypher in your brain
that whirs underneath it all. I could’t help it.”
You said “I couldn’t help it.
“Whatever hums, whatever filament is lit,
I will be there for you to short-circuit it.”

Personnel

DW – voice, piano, flute, pianet, hammer dulcimer, wine glasses, guzheng, percussion
EP – violin
KM – voice, bassoon
JH – electric bass
JG – drums, marimba
Darren Johnston – trumpet
Andrew Strain – trombone
Dave McNally – rhodes (loop)
Neil Hodge – drums (loop)
Ian Forsythe – no-input mixer