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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of How I Quelled the Mutiny, 5 demos, late 2018, and IVCC.
1. |
Leaving Port Townsend
04:11
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Leaving Port Townsend
Now that you’re gone
Are you going to haunt me?
Walk into my dreams?
Are you gonna guide me
Home through the forest?
With someone to guide me
Everything shattered
All of my stories:
Who we are, what we’re doing
What we think, what that means
In this direction the ferry is free
Lucky me
Seattle Airporter
You pay as you get off
No change for my $20
Driver just waves me on
Curbside check-in
No checked baggage
It’s like going downhill
This coming home
Borne on silver wings
Talking to no-one, Talking to no-one
I’ve got a notebook and a pen
I’ll write it down all over again
Over Shasta, Mt. Lassen
Where are you now? Where were you then?
It should have meant something
The sight of you dying
We shouldn’t be groping
We shouldn’t lying:
Who we are, what we’re doing
What we think, and why it matters
We all stood there, we saw the change
And we are still the same.
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2. |
Kali the Destroyer
03:39
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Kali The Destroyer
I am sitting in somebody’s living room
The lights are on, nobody’s home
I am sitting in somebody’s living room
Never felt so alone
I’m gazing at their fixtures
Hearing your voice on the phone
I’ve told myself a story
And this is what you say, you say:
“I’m sorry you got mugged
But I need you to stay away from me.”
One by one my hands pulled off the canyon rim
I fell that day and I’ve been falling ever since then
It will take me 14 years to write this song
Tell me, Mother Kali, where did I go wrong?
Tell me, Mother Kali, where do I belong?
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3. |
Church Creek Trail
04:04
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Church Creek Trail
Today I got up, made some toast
Went to work, then came home
Fed the cats, recycled all the mail
Thought about the Church Creek Trail
I drive well-worn roads each day
Half-awake, I know the way
Cutting plywood, what does my mind go
To that trail, those years ago?
Why oh why did we decide
To take the trail through the divide?
The shortest route was a broken line
Just 5 more miles, we’d already gone 9
100 side trails, the way to lose
100 foxtails in our shoes
Exasperation, heaving pain
Whose idea was this again?
The Church Creek Trail is unmaintained
And overgrown and with each rain grows
Indistinct and hard to see
And switches back relentlessly
Dry and dusty after May
With Poison Oak all in the way
Crushed under you heavy load
Why didn’t we take the road?
Why didn’t we, why didn’t we?
Nowhere to pause, no place to sit
But dusty culverts full of ticks
We plucked them off and we soldiered on
And prayed for the mercy of the rich Buddhists 3 miles on
We told them how we’d come so far
And they just frowned and took our credit cards
We spent the next year paying for it.
CH:
I think of how we almost died
I shake my head and I swell with pride
Hoisted by our own petard
We tried to take the easy way
And it was hard.
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4. |
A Spell to Remove Warts
03:46
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A Spell to Remove Warts
Oh little cookie crumb
Don’t build your house right there on the back of my thumb
Pick up all that stuff you brought
And go visit your brother who lives in a vacant lot
Hitch a ride on a run-down ice cream truck
You and all that you entail
Don’t set up shop right there right next you my fingernail
I hear there’s this guy in Japan
Who will help you if he can, and maybe he can…
Let’s face it, you don’t have a better plan
Ever smaller
Be gone like a wedding dress in pawn
Dry up like an unwatered lawn
Decrease, let your share price fall
‘Till you are nothing at all
You just wanted to sit down
But you’ve been preceded by your terrible renown
Helicopters circling round
And the rent’s too high in this town
Nothing left for you to do but sink down, sink down
Ever smaller...
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5. |
O-Dark Early
03:38
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O-Dark Early
This is the time of night when my eyes won’t open
By feel, by smell, let me burrow back into
Your sweet armpit
This is the time of night to be unconscious
To float along, dream on nothing
Be someplace else
It’s like a car crashing through a plate-glass window
But I shut it off and look over at you
Don’t know how you just sleep right through
Like it’s something we’re used to
Your eyelashes flicker as you softly dream
Never more beautiful than fast asleep at 3am
O-Dark early in the morning
Riding down this cold, dark road
Another sunrise, another day we gotta get through
Those empty shelves cant stock themselves
If no one goes, then goodness knows
The sun won’t rise
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6. |
PET Scan
03:36
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PET Scan
I’m waiting by the car
It always takes a long time
I tell myself to look more cheerful
No traffic at this time
No toast for you this morning
Just water and your medications
I brought a magazine
You brought the morning paper
You hate to wait when you’re not reading.
I’m there to hold your rings
I’ve got your purse and glasses
You can’t bring anything
A shiny new machine
An army of technicians
The special song it sings
We will go out to lunch
After you’ve had your PET scan
We’ll find a place to sit
And watch the people pass by
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7. |
How I Quelled the Mutiny
03:00
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How I Quelled the Mutiny
Scoundrels and ruffians
Sharp knives and insolent grins
We shipped a whole crew of them
For we were due to sail and I feared not them
With their shirking and grumbling
The very moment that we lost sight of land
Coarse, foul and quarrelsome
Sharp words and flogging are all they understand!
They sought to murder me
Whispered of mutiny!
So out came our weaponry
Any man who came aft of the mainmast would be shot!
But if they came peaceably
All of this bother, for my part, would be forgot
And so I went to their quarters, alone and unarmed, and spoke softly and compassionately to them, for I knew well and at first hand the miseries of a sailors life: The swindling innkeepers, the ceaseless brutality, and the terrible vices which they are so quick to fall prey to. And I offered them forgiveness and said a prayer that brought the hardest of them to tears.
Through this emergency, I conducted myself calmly
Faced down their villainy, stood up to their infamy
Calmly and bloodlessly
I quelled the mutiny
We shipped as enemies
And parted as friends.
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The Invincible Vacuum Cleaner Co. Alameda, California
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