This is a song I’ve been chipping away at for what seems like forever but is probably more like a year. I definitely pictured it as a grand recording, with an anthemic twin-guitar outro, like Thin Lizzy meets U2′s “Mothers of the Disappeared.” The shoestring-budget version of this vision is in the middle of being pieced together, but in the meantime, I kept practicing this in simpler form, to be ready to sing it. And I realized that, if strummed quickly on the acoustic, it works as a Jeff Tweedy solo kind of thing.
Lyrically, it’s another note-to-self, I guess. About all the distractions that tend to clog me up. And they’re everywhere, and it’s hard. But not impossible.
“Bury the Lead”
sunlight burns through evening’s pall
on for rent signs and dropped calls
a million of us funnel
by bicycle and tunnel
to our stacks of stallsand papers fold right up the street
and papers fold literally
but what’s tricky doesn’t matter
we’ll just cover it in batter
until it barely breathesclosing bells are no escape
from billboards giving me the shakes
it’s just sodium and nitrates
so why can’t i wait
for a proper paceyou’re begging me to bury the lead
run it now but bury the lead
well people aren’t pixels
and words are more than whistles
