Industrial Lullaby 1997
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LYRICS

The Upside Down

Anything You Want

Industrial Lullaby

Home

Coryanna

Blind Indifference

Dog On A Chain

Man O'War

So Many Miles Away

All The King's Horses

When The World Was A Well

 
I just don’t get it, I don’t understand

All those whip-smart minds got their heads in the sand

In the urban enclaves and in the towers downtown

See the drawbridges raised and the blinds pulled down

Chorus

But you can’t run, you can’t hide from the clowns

The circus performs in every town

You can’t run, and there’s no safe and sound

The outside breaks in and the upside down, the upside down

And all those lip-service merchants, the leaders we chose

See them toeing the line, see them thumbing the nose

Behind picket-fence teeth there’s a tongue-in-cheek greed

And when they bite themselves bloody, it’s you and me bleed

Chorus

And in the rush hour underground

Station after station, breathless headlines feed the kingdom of the open mouthed

Write the book each day

History has got nothing on the times in which we find ourselves

You might as well resign yourself

Some people are born with spit in their eye

Malevolent hearts and hard-luck lives

And you try for compassion, you try to be kind

Three hundred and sixty five days at a time

Chorus

 
I’ll pound another nail in your coffin

If you smoke me up before you send me home

Wake me at the crack-of-noon

If I get out now, it wouldn’t be too soon

And I’ve cut my prices at the knees

Anything you want you can get it from me

Labour, I got both hands in my pockets

Sex, I’m making out on the world wide web

Flyin’ solo’s such a drag

In a king-size bed or a sleeping bag

But it’s all good stuff everything you see

Anything you want you can get it from me

And I cut my prices at the knees

Anything you want you can get it from me

 
Oh work me up another cup of coffee

Shelter me a lot more than a minimum wage

Truth I wrote it all before

Tacked the list on my back door

Between the fine print and the guarantee

Anything you want you can get it from me

And it’s all good stuff everything you see

Anything you want you can get it from me

 
I’ve got a thin black raven in my side

Beating wings against my spine

And I can hear this life in the early dawn

Feel the gears of the rising sun

Chorus

All the buildings hang their smoke upon the sky

My industrial lullaby

East side Hastings and downtown Main

A ten-buck room from the west coast rain

Daredevil nerves and gasoline

See the little wolves in denim jeans

Chorus

 
And the road back home is rough and long

I left my family, I was much too young

There was a job and there was a girl

And a steel mill big as the whole wide world

Chorus

 
Tumbling in a tin can through the west-bound lanes of rush hour

Under dark December skies

The sunsets cold and rosy, painting fire on the highway

That reflects up in my eyes

Six strings strung on my guitar

Six lanes on this road

I always get this feeling going home

Remember down in Austin? There were flowers in November

And a pearl-handled Texas moon

We drove up to the mysteries in Dallas

And a cockroach motel room

Bullet holes in highway signs

Ghosts upon the road

I always get this feeling going home

Chorus

Back home, where my life unwinds, where I find the time to feel

Home, turn the headlights off, close my eyes and let go of the wheel

Eighteen hours and fifteen minutes, glued behind the engine

I am flying on the ground

Captured in my rear-view, history plays on the horizon

Like a film without the sound

Days are stained with traveling

Started long ago

I always get this feeling going home

Chorus

Home, where the road slips by the moon above the fields

Home, turn the headlights off, close my eyes and let go of the wheel

Coryanna
Stephen Fearing/ Willie P. Bennett 1996 © Mummy Dust / Fearing and Loathing Music/ Willie P. Bennett Publishing
 

So we struggle and we stall and we burn like pure alcohol

We curse aloud from forgotten childhood places

But my intentions were never so clear, my faith so strong and so near

My chance to draw the heart out of the aces

Chorus

Coryanne, Coryanna look at all the planets up above

Can you imagine all the longing and the hearts that beat for love?

People will say what they will, some people can’t keep advice to themselves

Tough love dispensed from travel-worn suitcase

But tell me how could I refuse this rose too magnificent to lose

I shed my thorns when I choose the open spaces

Chorus

I knew the path I would choose, I could just see myself stepping out with you

We made this bed and now we lie in its good graces

And though we struggle and we stall, relearn the heart’s hard protocol

I turn to you with all my changing faces

Chorus

Blind Indifference
Stephen Fearing 1997 © Mummy Dust/ Fearing and Loathing Music

These train tracks run parallel and never shall they meet

And you and I are two sides of the same suburban street

We share the same religion and we hum the same old songs

And we learn to keep our distance and we never get along

Chorus

Oh mercy, shine your love on me

Take this blind indifference and make me see

All the good around me, all the friends that keep me clean

Human beings were never born to be so mean

 
The cost of happiness is rising like the stink of gasoline

Blowing down the highway from the trucks and the limousines

In the streets the tempers and the V8 pistons fly

Curses flung like bottles at the endless passerby

Chorus

 
I’ve been thinking about my father, thinking about his son

Caught between what could have been and the things that we should have done

Sometimes I think the only thing that keeps you from someone

Is the pride you never lost and the respect that you never won

Chorus

Dog On A Chain
Stephen Fearing ©  Mummy Dust/ Fearing and Loathing Music

My poor secret shadow

How long have you walked

Obscured in the dark of my shade?

You were born right behind me

Like a dog on a chain

Watching all the mistakes I have made

And when one tired candle

Makes a cavern of my room

And the ashtray spills over on the page

You flicker above me

Like a swollen balloon

In the wrought-iron fiction of your cage

Chorus

It’s a long time ‘til morning

Re-confines you

In the bright, golden fetters of the day

When you will walk on behind me

Like a dog on a chain

Watching all the mistakes I have made

 
My poor secret shadow

You are older than me

You are old as the debts I haven’t paid

Yet you follow me blindly

Like a dog on a chain

After all the mistakes I have made

Chorus

 
You will walk on behind me

Like a dog on a chain

After all the mistakes I have made

Man O’ War
Stephen Fearing – 1996 © Mummy Dust / Fearing and Loathing Music

 
The war was nearly over when the general came

To tour the wounded soldiers in their beds

And he walked among the suffering and the amputees

Like he was an angel

Most of us were innocent until we heard his name

Too young for pints and Whisky in The Jar

But we were soaked in the tradition of the open flame

We were just sparks in the darkness of the man o’ war

Chorus

The man o’ war painting ancient battles

See the farmers in the trenches where the cowherds are the cattle

Every generation wipes the blood off of the saddle

For the man o’ war.

How many thousand years since the start of time

Has the general led his people by the nose?

Corporate inspiration and a bloody mind

That’s how this game goes

And he took me from the playground showing me photographs

Corpses stacked like cordwood on a floor

He said “your father and his father and on down the line

You are all indispensable to the man o’ war”

Chorus

 
Oh the cheap broken china of civilians

And the anguish of a father breaking down

The long line of people and possessions

Searching for a child amongst the crowd

And the eyes just dry out if you don’t close them

And the heart becomes immune to the sounds

I lost my religion to a rifle

But I’ll talk to any deity now

The war was nearly over when the general came

To tour the wounded soldiers in their beds

And he walked among the suffering and the amputees

Like he was an angel

Some kind of angel

So Many Miles Away
Stephen Fearing 1996 © Mummy Dust/ Fearing and Loathing Music

I’m always chasing after my restless, hungry mind

The bar fills up with strangers armed with drinks to put the long day’s work behind them

And my solitary shell is something I thought I might grow out of with age

Ah this loneliness is getting old and I’m so many miles away

This morning broke on the sunny side in the dark, iron hollow of the dawn

I wandered down for coffee through a haze of smoke and last-night’s song

And picking up your letter, I read between the lines that lovers say

“Distance is precarious for me…” so many miles away

There was something in a dream I left behind

A portent or a sign

A road I could have taken

Introspection can be a crutch

Sometimes I think too much

Cerebral isolation

Tractors blocked the traffic as I drove through all the mid-day farming towns

Sunlight splintered of the cars and cut the threads of winter from the ground

And stopping on a high-street, I phoned you from the back of a café

Just to listen to you breathing, so many miles away.

All The King’s Horses
Stephen Fearing – 1996 © Mummy Dust / Fearing and Loathing Music

 
Don’t lecture me, don’t hit me with that stick

I know how easily the little lies run off your lip

I know that jerking knee, I know the bully-legged kick

It don’t take genius to see people driven by the whip

And as we run downhill I think that we must love disaster

Because there’s so much bad will, unhappy ever after

And it makes me look between the crying and the laughter

Me and my kindhearted eyes

This country’s gone to hell and we just vote reactionary

Too many times to the well and all the mines are full of dead canaries

Everybody’s pain, every voice is hoarse and dull

As the reptile brain uncoils inside the skull

Watch it roll downhill, Ah there’s nothing like a good disaster

There’s so much bad will, unhappy ever after

But I have to look between the crying and the laughter

Me and my kindhearted eyes

Oh give me whiskey, give me water, give me something good to say

Hope that fills the morning like a songbird in an alleyway

Give me something more than counted chickens on the Sabbath day

Jesus has left the building carrying faith away

Tear the heroes down, pull the posters off the wall

Yesterday’s underground in a delete bin at the mall

It got so desperate, all the kings horses and his men

Forgot their history, they stuck the egg back on the wall again

And it rolled downhill, oh people love disaster

‘Cause there’s so much bad will, unhappy ever after

But I have to look between the crying and the laughter

Me and my kindhearted eyes

Me and my kindhearted eyes

Me and my kindhearted eyes

When The World Was A Well
Stephen Fearing 1995 © Mummy Dust / Fearing and Loathing Music

Cast your nets on the water and your gaze on the sky

If it all crumbles tomorrow, take strength from what you try

Fear is our companion all the days going by

And not the fear of the unknown but of all the little bones inside

Chorus

Long ago I remember when the world was a well

And we reached for the oyster and the pearl and the shell

But we got lost in reflections and went over our heads

Lost the thrill of affection and the reasons we wed

f the heart is an arrow then life must be the bow

So let it fly like one of God’s sparrows over all you think you know

And if love is the anvil that you forge your days upon

When that world comes to a standstill, pick up your bow and move along

Chorus

Cast your nets on the water and your gaze on the sky