Get all 14 Pale Bird releases available on Bandcamp and save 35%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of The World Outside My Window, Unwavering Sentinels of Dreaming, I Told You How Important You Would Be, Apple Tree, Year of The Bird (Volume 4), Year Of The Bird (Volume 3), Year of The Bird (Volume 2), Year of the Bird (Volume 1), and 6 more.
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Man, this city’s a humid clamshell
I heard about it in the movies
Just a lot of people talking
Had I come here in the 80s
The actors wouldn’t be on screen
Weirdest people, daring us to think
Dream about something we can’t see
Back of envelope, blotted black with ink
On top of Covert Park
The river surrounded me
Bus dropped me off back here somehow
There was nowhere else I had to be
Do you feel like you missed the bus?
You got off a stop too late
Ever feel like you’re still working it out?
Have a feeling you should have stayed?
Those towers are crystal daggers
Dreams pinned down by glass and steel
That used to be downtown
Are you missing how that feels?
Just now a woman passed
Completely focussed on what was in her hands
Real cloudy-looking jar of something
I didn’t even stop to ask
Mean what you say, your words
They’re so abstract, so confusing
So earnest and so strange
Vivid and deranged, full of what you feel
It’s possible, it’s the only way
Just pour yourself into that jar
Like a drummer stuck in a groove
Completely obsessed with getting to what’s
Real
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2. |
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We learned through conjuration
By giving our demons flesh
They could at last be vanquished
We formed our congregation
Each one as a horror dressed
Armed with highfalutin language
Anna was spiders, eating up the city
Danny was fascism, that wasn’t pretty
Rita was earthquakes, shaking up the ground
Jeff was no meaning to be found
Leslie was turning into her mother
Dave went as The Other
We all looked so good
Putting on our fear
Terror seemed so passe
When it bears the face
Of someone you hold dear
Disguised with paper mâché
Mark came dressed as H R Giger’s Alien
Alice came as desertification
Kerry was the fear that this fear will never leave again
James dressed up as Nyarlathotep
I was unoriginal
I came as the whole universe
J was losing all their hair
Katie was falling down the stairs
Ahsan was flying through the air
Brendon was being savaged by a bear
Bob came as no one liking him
Alex came as your life not mattering
Charlie came as being trapped in a sentient world of pain for all eternity
Chris was dressed as being unable to help and protect the ones you love
Joseph K came as his dad
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3. |
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I love how this city’s oozing art
It’s being squeezed so hard
You’re a bubble rising up
And they’ll never let you pop
I know I’m not the only one
Afraid to fall asleep
I love the noise coming off the street
As you twist your heel around
At least we got some decent punk
It’s hard not to love that sound
I know I’m not the only one
Who’s scared they will never wake
If they fall asleep in the passenger seat
Pull over, this has to be the place
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4. |
The Cascade Mountains
02:39
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The cascade mountains are a range formed in, and still capable of exerting, terrifying destructive power. In the late 1990s, the area around Mount Rainier experienced a huge tectonic pressure, itself the direct consequence of aftershocks from a seismic shift emanating several centuries before in central and northern England - one that made subsequent events seem benign by comparison, until the incredible geological era of the 20th century. In 1997, gigantic crystal shards erupted from the ground across southwest Canada, trapping people in a glassy maze of soap bubble Chrysanthemum and glittering mandibles. Some of these structures were hundreds of stories tall, and many there found in difficult to stay among this unfamiliar environment. Others still flocked to become part of this newly-discovered phenomenon.
Even before the eruption of Mount St Helens in May 1980, geological events were already have their impacts on the people of Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington, and the wider Pacific Northwest, as they experienced an influx of refugees from the fault-riddled valleys of Northern California. Luckily, many of these refugees brought with them the valuable skills of engineering, brewing, and the precious resources of sourdough and kombucha cultures, saved from the teetering ruins of the cities they were fleeing. Many years later, in the 2010s, fires began to break out along the unstable San Andreas Fault, centred around three locations: Firstly, performance venues unloved by capital; secondly, in the countryside around homes of people who did not work for tech firms with a multibillion dollar valuation; and thirdly, in a phenomenon science cannot explain, Rupert Murdoch’s house.
Geologists believe the Central Valley filled first with sand; then with fire; then with water; and are predicting that next it will fill with stone; then paper; then scissors.
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5. |
Minnesota Sunrise
03:51
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Did I lose a friend, or keep an enemy I’d made at arm’s length?
I trust my senses when my gut feeling is strong
That doesn’t mean I’m never wrong
You don’t lay out bear traps to catch a mouse
Or if you do, it’s overkill
And all the time you spend
Driving dearest friends to the nearest hospital
I stepped out wearing only what god gave me
In a Minnesota sunrise
I wondered if the place would want to hurt me
It was 260 Kelvin
You don’t have to close the doors
Pull the curtains, never love again
Train a girl to fuck up men
No more kissing frogs
But hey - guess what? Frogs are people too
In this metaphor
Frogs have feelings, some are brightly coloured, delicate
Some of them are poisonous
Some of them will sing for you
If you ask them
Make a soothing noise for us
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6. |
A Sad Bat
03:11
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Black spartan lands
Salt flats and pans
Vast, Atacaman, all asphalt and glass
What a man saw was that sand as a maw
Past as a path, as a trap, as a flaw
A scarab ball, an alarm, a star fall
Mark that dark patch that casts a ghast pall
Craft a small map - salad days call!
Grasp at that canvas, claw as an awl
Dark falls past bad days
Man sat at a camp
Palm wraps an arm and a scarf wraps a hand
Was that a jackdaw, a hawk, a sad bat?
Warmth crawls as dawn draws an arc, a sharp band
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7. |
Fire at Sea
04:06
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You used to dream
Of that marmalade flame settling over the water
From the bow of boat, where the tanks overflow
And the air up above
Was an impassible wood
Twisting black yews
Dark as the crude
How that fills up my memories, I’d never realised
How that fills up my dreams, I never knew
And that lone wolfish hunger
When a young man sees float into view
A city at night for the very first time
New York or London or Tokyo or Rome
A sailor is someone that we all hope to be
A sailor is someone without any home
If you don’t want to burn, you can turn your head down
From the top of the ocean
Let it cover your crown
And dive deep towards the inevitable
But this dream that you had never appeared
And you gave away your parrot
And you trimmed back your beard
And you made your way back from the sea
To a place where you can run from the fire, or at least
There’s always rescue at hand
You made your way back to the land
You made your way back home
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8. |
Maslow
04:20
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Run - Put one foot in front of the other and keep pushing forward,
toward… that doesn’t matter, this is all you have to remember
Cold and wet, it’s dark and I’m hungry - I feel
so weary - why the hell do I have to be
You don’t have to keep on running
You don’t have to keep on going
Do you think anyone will notice
I don’t think anyone will notice
I don’t know if some Higher
Power animates my steps
But if it’s going to
Show Its hand
it’s still got
Half the
story
left
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9. |
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I’m so grateful to be standing here before you - my voice is full of genuine surprise - on this, the most auspicious of occasions. I don’t know how I got here and I really don’t know why.
(Largely, I suspect, structural privilege, and something that looks like the luck I’ve always lived with. The difference is unclear)
I’m so glad I’m here with you
Dressed up, on the town
You look so good
When you’re not wearing a hospital gown
You still looked good then
Stop playing the music
I haven’t finished talking yet
I’ve a lot more thanks to give
Some platitudes I haven’t said
Is love all you need, really?
Sitting here in a winter living room
Alone, but for the imaginary crowds
At a ceremony in my honour of my devising
I’d have to say it is
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10. |
Goodbye, 2018
03:39
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Photographing your food is a hipster millennial grace
Showing some thanks to other instagram users
That you have some food to shove into your face
It’s been a wonderful adventure
It’s been a horrendous ordeal
I hate that you went through that assault course of misery
I’m grateful for every meal
Now I know the music is conveying
A cheerfulness and resolution
Not justified by anything we’ve seen
But I think we can agree
It was pretty bracing to be alive in 2018
It’s truly that time of the year
To cast our hopefulness aside
To wrap up in paper and ribbon and bow
And put in our cupboard this piece of our lives
When I wake up on January 1st
I’ll still be full up of hunger and thirst
For a me that’s blank-faced, a new slate and some words
To the effect that the last me was really the worst
My fatalism is a polished shield
So even as I turn my back on the coming year
That dread medusa
I have a way of looking over my shoulder, into the future
What a wonder it will be to be alive in the year of our lord 2019
And what do you need my love, what do you need?
I will find it for you, you just have to ask
It’s been a twister of a year
So much we knew is gone
The instinct is to wrap this up
But the story tumbles on
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