1. |
High Season
06:41
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The sea is close
As close as you can get to eternity
It goes on
Churning bodies
Flat on your back on the beach
Imagining
Every wave drowns
The bored voices around you
You don’t so much
Wish for their death
You only want a piece
Of the endless complete
Soak in
The only peace that power will accept
Listen
To the radios turned on and left
You never cared to come alone
Before today, my evil twin
Back when you lived and loomed
So large, a reflection
In the sunglasses of women
A shadow now like every old friend
Still trying to get outside of eternity
Well the first round
The first round’s on me
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2. |
Our Kin
04:19
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Sister when was the last time you truly
Truly felt a spark
The universe has no expression
Like our father
The time you tried
To tell him how he was
Unmarked
There’s a new chill in the air
As I’m crossing over Afton Mountain
To see you, my family
It’s only on these long drives
I kill enough time
Until all I’m seeing is the way
I’ve been approaching forever
All you all ever did was try
All you all ever did was try
To warn me
Me and these five old sidemen
Carry the body
And the women serve the bereaved
Tallow in plastic plates
To express nothing
Our kin take such pains
Are you surprised
We spent our lives in search
Of the strongest ways to say
The strongest ways to say
What are we really mourning
In the cinderblock walls
Of a church rec room
Sister you look so hung over
I might have to carry you
Tell me am I just stuck
Behind eighteen-year-old eyes
That still look down on this town
Toward an escape, or am I
Actually holding my own now
Holding my own now to account
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3. |
Frontier Forever
03:29
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OK I’ve got the basics down now
Another hard-won view rings true
And the ring’s outlasted
And slowly I’m turning to
Alternative routes
The ways I take to get back
When I am overdue
When I light
Out for the high countryside
To be reminded how life
Should really let a moment die
I find the rhythm of water and sandstone
Carving canyons that show
A river never stops keeping time
Deep time
Frontier terrain forever
Is all I see the whole way back
Wide open country that sells
Living free
How this could be control
Without conspiracy
Is a view from this beautiful land
No one wants to see
When I light
Out for the bright city night
To be reminded how life
Should really let a moment die
I wonder how many years have I got left
Driving back to the same old fear
How do we assume the new
Will make anything else clear
When I light
Out for the bright city night
To be reminded our kind
Can never let a moment die
And find the rhythm of water
And sandstone
Carving canyons that show
A river never stops keeping time
Keeping the frontier line
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4. |
Caught Up Blues
05:01
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How could you not look back
At your own at what you came from
And find all the same ancient shame
Is still the measure of how far you’ve come
When I was fifteen
You put all these deadbolts on our house
And kept the keys and the connection to me
Sorta blinked out
I never understood you after that
But I came to be grateful
For the way that the years
Let me down
Now it’s easy to welcome
Any light to be found
And it’s around you and your new
Widower now
Meanwhile my own bride and I
We’re looking at the odds
And it’s a full-time job
To keep giving a fuck
It’s a cheap shot
But it’s true
All anyone seems to know how to do
Is get caught up
When it was over
I signed as a witness
Stared at the sight
Of my father’s name
I spent a long afternoon with the family
Such as it was
And the clear-cut lakeside view
Was humming
As I talked with my sister’s eldest one
Abigail
About leaving home as
Something we were owed and
About what was coming
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5. |
Born Outside
04:13
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Put the finishing touches on
A watershed year
In transformation pain
Mark where you stand
Outside the picture now
By enclosing it in this frame
O little child
You will never know a world
That lets you forget
What you’ve been
When I was a boy
I honestly thought
I would be relieved to find out
How the story ends
O little child
You will never know the world
That let you forget
What you’d been
I really thought I would be
relieved to find out
Where I fit in
For most of my life
I’ve done nothing but burn through
The inheritance every day
Never imagining never imaging
I would live to see a demagogue
Finally get the keys to the United States
Even though we had this coming
My old man’s own notion of living free
Wore down his resistance
If you were born here, son
Before long you were strung out
All strung out on the frontier distance
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6. |
Shenandoah Granite
05:44
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It’s nothing you could ever outgrow
Once you’re old enough to know
And so bored
No matter how clear you see
From this high hill
Where everything is still
Under the sword
I had to go lie down for a while
On the Shenandoah granite
The slow cure for our grief
Shaping, laying waste
It gives my mind a little peace
Well that’s where I’m standing now
And from where I’m standing
I don’t want to see
The family beaten by time and needs
Sacrificed
I’m old enough to know how
Every year moves the ground
Silently
Beneath our feet
Driving down to the lights
Through town to the highway pines
I’m headed home
To be shown that the drift has grown
That it’s our labor now
On which we depend
Even if we’re just turning
Into the bedrock in the end
With the consolation that you remain my one
True friend
Now we’ve been scared
And bored at the same time
For the civilized
It’s hard to feel otherwise
It’s important to be kind
Worry is a waste of time
Because you won’t be able
To avoid living through
The children somehow
When the world is reduced once again
To the ancient sound
To the rhythms of the house
When you’re old enough to know how
Every year moves the ground
Silently
Beneath our feet
Driving down to the lights
Through town to the highway pines
Headed home
To be shown that the drift has grown
That it’s our labor now
On which we depend
Even if we’re just turning
Into the bedrock in the end
And you and I can find
No words of consolation
Left to lend
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7. |
Blood Vessel
05:22
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I’ve been asking ever since
Our blood was born
What did I become
What did I become a vessel for
Airlifted out of the smoke
Of a young man’s pride
Overfed
Headed dead into the middle of life
Like everyone else, I try
But I haven’t got the time
To sit through all of it
The national psychosis
It takes all our strength
Just to keep what we have intact
And no one says a thing
But they have to know
They have to know what it feels like
Right before you collapse
They built another overpass
So I went
To check out the view
With the boy as the lens
And I remembered I knew
Just how far this interstate led
You can take it, I said
You can take it all the way
To the end of the west
He was too young then
To get much out of this
Have I ever said a single thing
Not for my own benefit
When our hillside house
Was in sight
I saw you watching us walk
Down the long, long incline
A vessel of three
And the only essential fact
Our only course to take
Down through the rolling unfolding
Soft collapse
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8. |
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The last thing I want to do
Is file another field piece
About what it means
To raise a human being
But the fact is
Another one is gone to stay
And I’ve long since dug in
For the real reckoning
That a child, a child is always on the way
I wasn’t trained to be the killer
I was never trained at all
To game whatever could be gained
The old man’s hand
Was as straight as they came
But instruction I had to find
Every time after the fact
Forever back in the back of a bored class
Wandering wild
A child is always on the way
So for you I will take
Great pains to explain
And fall short
Another white man scared shitless
All the news will give you
Is the shooter’s aim
And the opposing sides you need to know
To decide who you should blame
No one’s ever going to try too hard
To make you see
What goes further than this
Further than thee
Our horror and beauty
Are shades of the same
That it’s never too late to go out
And stake your own claim
And a child is always on the way
Wandering wild
A child is always on the way
Further than thee
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Scivic Rivers Durham, North Carolina
Scivic Rivers is the musical nom de plume of American singer-songwriter Randy Bickford; the new self-titled album is Bickford’s seventh LP.
** scivicrivers.com **
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