1. |
Secret Passage
03:01
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There’s a secret passage you’re trying to find
It’s somewhere in the margins of the book of life
Yeah it’s an article of faith that all will be revealed in time
But still some questions linger in your mind
Like could you trace the arc of the universe
Right to where it meets the curve of the earth?
And is the future assured?
Where is that written and in whose words?
Well, you believe none of what you’ve seen
And only half of what you’ve read
But still some images you cannot get out of your head
Like the solo spotter on the giant vessel’s prow
And the happy throngs below deck
Who haven’t figured it out
Every narrated day
One more piece falls into place
With every scene, every page, every verse, every stage
You ask yourself
Could you trace the arc of the universe
Right to where it meets the curve of the earth?
If there’s a path to rebirth
Where is that written, and in whose words?
Every single narrated day
One more telltale piece falls into place
Every verse on every page
Every scene on every stage
Is everything
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2. |
The Days Don't End
03:16
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Last of the gang to go
Burning up with morning light, room of a hundred lives
Through the window a song that guides me blindly on
We don’t care that no year is for sure
Or that our best friends are berserk
Summer air will be thick with memory
When I’m wrong
When I’m lost
When the road is long
I know who will lead me through the dark
No time is too much for the young and unrushed
And with every July the sun breaks through the night
We don’t care that no year is for sure
Or that our best friends are berserk
Summer air will be thick with memory
Last of the gang to go
A star explodes in the field
Never alone again — the days don’t end
And I’ve been thinking about the lost years
Haunting, blinding, they add up
I won’t make that mistake again
No borders form around a life
We’re free to roam the winding nights
Look at the borrowed, look at the blue
How we wait inside the waiting room
We’re older now but never old
On a summer day, a son comes home
The days don’t end
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3. |
Too Long At The Fair
03:33
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Just like anyone who sees through gimlet eyes
Just like anyone who’s alive
I searched for a space where life’s just a mind game
But I’ve been too long at the fair
That’s where the best minds of my generation
Took their pleasure and their profit and gave their lives
And sometimes I can’t help but think about
What we might have achieved
If we hadn’t so blindly believed
In that know-it-all bohemian dream
Too long at the fair I’ve spent,
Lost in the fog of the years
And all the rarefied things
That try as I might
Could only fail to succeed
To be a comfort to me
So cold the nights misspent
In the loam of my youth
Cultivating a spurious faith
In the power of taste
To be a route of escape
From all the long, hard work
Set for us at birth
It’s gonna be a long, hard road
Back to Planet Earth
Another year, another pass
Through the crowded corridors of the archive stacks
Another round of laments
For a dream that’s dead
But in an earlier phase, a youthful haze,
The wishing well was only just half-dry
It was the height of the age
Of the self-made sage
And there was reason to believe
Everyone would be
A muse-kissed authority
In a free land
Turn on the news today
See all the creative ways
By means of which a souls gets saved
In a free land
It’s gonna be a long, hard road
Back to Planet Earth
Think of all the long, hard work
Set for us at birth
Our precious expertise
Now debased currency
In the marketplace of prestige
In a free land
Think of what else we might have achieved
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4. |
Who Is Who
03:32
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Please don’t ask me any questions
That you don’t want the answers to
And there’s no need to remind me
Of who I was or what I used to do
Cause I haven’t forgotten and I know
Who is who, the very essence of you,
And it still holds true
But I remember the shadowplay
Back in that room of my own
At the window, against the day,
Was where I stood alone
There’s a turn of phrase I can’t find
It doesn’t matter — you’ll read my mind
What’s there to say? Why not just smile?
When we’ve been over and over and over this
They say your face now looks like mine
Well, they don’t say it but I can feel it
How best to combine the spoils of a life?
Pile it all into a shrine or chop it up with a knife?
Well, I’m sure we’ll decide in the fullness of time
But there are so many things
I never wanted you to know
And there was probably a moment
When I told myself that I had to go
‘Cause I remember those highwire days
The sky down beneath my shoes
So much since then has changed
Like how beautiful life is with you
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5. |
Memento
02:40
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Unshield your eyes
The righteous walk is long
To truth, where love begins
Quieted our doubtful minds
That knocked us off our way
And it’s cold, in the shade,
In the shadow that the world leaves
There’s no nostalgia in
The dream where I escape
The people turn and stare
At this empty painted sky
We’ll keep no memento for
The lives we’ll leave behind
When words fail I’ll borrow yours
Dark days ahead in the old world
As the new struggles to be born
Unshield your eyes
The righteous walk is long
To truth, where love begins
The flowers for soldiers
Wilt in children’s hands
On and on, on and on
When I reach out, they pull away
When I return one day, I won’t recall this place
Hand in hand — we’ll decide
But keep no memento for what we leave behind
Scatter the seeds when it’s warm
In the fall, we’ll see what’s born
Hand in hand — we’ll decide
But no memento for what we leave behind
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6. |
Marathon
03:01
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Out west the trees burn and bow
In a long Pacific frown
The sun is on its own
Over clouds of commuter smoke
Rain pisses down in heavy sheets
We cross the lonely street
It’s up to you and me
Where are they now? Are they here?
The brightest lights have disappeared
Striving now in safe retreat
There are no stars to the fleet
It’s up to you and me
The singers have no songs
Silence fills the halls
No stars to hitch a dream
To find our way
And the poets have no poems
The writers’ words don’t fill their tomes
Look at the lines that divide who suffer
How far apart we keep each other
A star to which we’ll hitch a dream
So that we might find our way
To sugar and peace and sage
To a land so warm and sweet and just
A horizon that we can run
Never got where I hoped to get
But I guess it’s not over yet
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7. |
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But what if we don’t
Retrieve what’s lost to this winding road?
We always approach, we always get close,
But we never arrive, no
In every town, a choir of kids in a cul-de-sac
Live blissful days that will never come back
Never come back, never
The after-dinner glow
In the kitchens of a billion homes
Meet at the back door
Walk the field where we often go
Starry days disappear into cloudy skies and
One day I’ll learn that they’ll never come back
Never come back, never
And nobody’s ever home
The lights are never on
I strike a match — the spark won’t flame
Hands reach out but never take
And nobody’s ever home, no
So I stand in the foamy waves
Love their impossible gaze
There’s a magic in the way they come and go
With every passing day
I see myself in morning light
I must change my life
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8. |
Foreword
01:44
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9. |
Belle Époque
05:46
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10. |
Just Our Imagination
03:17
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We tell ourselves stories in order to live
It's just our imagination
We take comfort in what we know can't exist
It's just our imagination
We do it over and over
As we get older and older
But there was a time when they were as real
As anything we could touch or see
In place of futures now undreamed:
Images of the world as it might have been
Rebellion is playing out in our minds
We’re resigned
We told ourselvеs stories of how we might be
It's just our imagination
For thе promise of victory, we learned from defeat
It's just our imagination
Out in the garden of forking paths
An infinite number of worlds in our grasp
Everything on the table, every ball in the air
Everything imagined was somewhere out there
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