1. |
B
02:06
|
|||
2. |
Sleepwalker
05:08
|
|||
|
You were born into a world filled with stained glass people
And they wept perfect tears that never made their eyes red
And you thought that they were real
So you became a hologram made of fraction-colored glass
And you painted on your smile every morning
And you thought that it was real
But sleepwalker, I will cry your tears for you
Until you learn their value
And dream burglars, I will break your plastic molds
Until the whole assembly line folds
Because I want to see your soul
You spend your days walking these blasphemous chapels
And you wonder which of the figures in the window is your mother
And you wonder if you’re real
Sleepwalkers, you must learn to cry your own tears,
Let them sting and let them sear
And dream burglars will not put you in their molds
They’ll know you can’t be sold
And you’ll know that they were real
And that you, yourself are real
That everyone and everything is real.
|
||||
3. |
Parking Lot Revival
05:50
|
|||
|
In those parking lots of french fries cheapened by the night skies
A man falls to his knees
As tears exit his eyes, all the stuff that he buys
lands next to his keys
He cries whoa
My whole life is a cartoon
And whoa
I hope I find a way back to myself soon
Because all my words are foreign to me
They’re all from a script that I couldn’t see till now
A poet sits in her room
Words drip from her womb
But she neglects this child
As she moves towards her tomb
All the words in her loom,
They all come unraveled
She cries whoa
My whole life is a cartoon
And whoa
I hope I find a way back to myself soon
Because all my words are foreign to me
They’re all from a script that I couldn’t see till now
They based their fictions off of details
That were not important to the plots
They had perfect grammar
But they never said a word worth remembering
In the woods a sage is meditating
Climbing trees and ideating
She sees what we can’t:
That we are all just commentating
On each other’s never fading facades as simple ants
We cry whoa
This whole life is a cartoon
And whoa
I hope we find a way back to ourselves soon
Because all our words are foreign to us
They all come from places we can’t get to by bus
But if this whole life’s a cartoon, then we might as well laugh.
|
||||
4. |
Specimen
08:12
|
|||
|
The day that they found
You’d flung the doors to your mind wide open
Was the day they tried to break into your head
With a rusty battering ram
You failed to learn to hate your neighbor
And love yourself
And so they decided
To try to close your mind
Doctor where’d you put my daughter?
She didn’t come back home with me
You’ve trapped her in a bottle
I can barely hear her failing voice
It’s not that you’re insane
You’re just unafraid to feel
But they couldn’t understand
So they labeled you with a diagnosis
And put you on the shelf to cultivate
And in time they prescribed poorly tested drugs
To fill the crevasses where you kept your feelings
Until you could not feel anything
Doctor where’d you put my friend
A different person left your office
You’ve trapped him in a jar
A specimen to do experiments on
As you grew older you were taught
To climb the corporate ladder
And at the top you’d find a heterosexual marriage
And a small fortune
When you would not conform
They clasped you by the hand and proclaimed congratulations
As they pushed you towards quicksand
And all the while they were painting a number over your name
Doctor where’d you put my soul?
I can’t find it through the haze
My head was a blank book
You filled it with a maze
So unlock the bars on all of the cages
And let us roam free in the expanses of our own minds
We never meant harm to anyone
We just refused to be brainwashed into societal norms
My head was a blank book
You filled it with a maze
|
||||
5. |
Icarus
04:02
|
|||
|
When we were young, you said
“I’ll touch the sun,” he said
“You haven’t won,” I said
But who does?
I miss you in a sense
I miss our innocence
I miss the soft defense
Of wonder
But when you go back to that starry hole, I hope you’ll know that I won’t be there
Because your soul left both of our bodies in limbo
You’re just a big bundle
Of well thought-out screams
Who shared most of my dearest childhood dreams
And if you walk back to the end, you’ll see
That you thirst to be thirsty
And if you walk back to the start, you’ll see
That I was all blurry,
Yeah I was all blurry
Didn’t you notice?
Look at your eyes tonight
They gave me quite a fright
Inflamed with Aphrodite’s love juice
I wish I’d had less fear
When your eyes were still clear
And you held me near
At Skate King
But when you go back to that starry hole, I hope you’ll know that I won’t be there
Because your soul left both of our bodies in limbo
You’re just a big bundle
Of well thought-out screams
Who shared most of my dearest childhood dreams
And if you walk back to the end, you’ll see
That you thirst to be thirsty
And if you walk back to the start, you’ll see
That I was all blurry,
Yeah I was all blurry
Didn’t you notice?
Burn yourself down, sing your eyes out
|
||||
6. |
The Hitchhiking Sailor
06:55
|
|||
|
Life is short
What are you crying for?
Don’t waste your time
Hiding behind a salty waterfall
Won’t get you to the ocean
Chivalry is dead
Don’t get your panties in a twist
No one will save you
You are your own knight
It’s your responsibility to save yourself
You’re a rat
Kicked from ship to ship
Go captain your own
Think you can only be the main character
If it’s someone else’s book
But all you are is a worm eating the page
Chivalry is dead
Don’t get your panties in a twist
No one will save you
You are your own knight
It’s your responsibility to save yourself
Your validation, it lies in yourself
You’ll never find it in anyone else
So come out of your turtle shell
And walk with your own legs
Being carried by a seagull
Does not give you wings
Chivalry is dead
Don’t get your panties in a twist
No one will save you
You are your own knight
It’s your responsibility to save yourself
So save yourself
|
||||
7. |
Pastels
03:19
|
|||
|
You sit beside a cheap bedside angel
Waiting for the sun
With visions of pastel chakras
Forming nebulas in the black holes in your mind
You let the halos of all the headlights
That drift past your window in the night
You let them grow loud in your mind
Forming static to distort all your nightmares
But then the tangerine dawn
Takes its toll
Takes your soul
But gives you a new one
|
||||
8. |
The Sad Optimist
05:34
|
|||
|
You were my first guitar chord
My first silent song
My first atonal melody
You were my first taste
Of grapefruit juice in the starry morning
You were in the face of every stranger
That happy sense of danger
That comes from being alive
I’m looking for the power cord to my love
So I can unplug it, so I can unplug it
I finally found the truth in your own words:
That I’m just a sad optimist trying to help an already happy pessimist
And we used song as our middleman
We sang only in past tense
As if it could muffle the tolling of the bell
That rang for the end of our imagined love
You were my first brittle smile
The only hug I ever had that left me stinging
You were the gunpowder
That I used when I burned down my own home
But after I look through all the embers
I’ll know how to dismember
This toxic, tangled vine
And I’m looking for the power cord to my love
So I can unplug it, so I can unplug it
I finally found the truth in your own words:
That I’m just a sad optimist trying to help an already happy pessimist
And we used song as our middleman
We sang only in past tense
As if it could muffle the tolling of the bell
That rang for the end of our imagined love
|
||||
9. |
Diary of a Blueprint
04:08
|
|||
|
Today Tommy showed me a new way to walk
Where you outline each step in bright blue chalk
That way when you’re lookin’ to explore a new block
You’ll know where you’ve already been
Today I saw a lady on TV
With long spindly legs, thin as could be
And that spider woman, she said to me,
“This is what you’ve always wanted”
And I thought I knew
Just what I needed
But they knew what I wanted
And they made me need it
They wrapped me in blueprints
And threw me in the conditioning room
Today I went shopping in the shiny new mall
To create an image to mask my fall
Wonder if anyone will notice at all
That I stopped being real
And I thought I knew
Just what I needed
But they knew what I wanted
And they made me need it
They wrapped me in blueprints
And threw me in the conditioning room
|
||||
10. |
Questions
03:15
|
|||
|
Where do the streets go when there’s no one to walk them?
Where does a desert go when it rains?
Where does a smile go when there’s no face to hold it?
I think you should stick around and find out
Because I want to see you smile in the morning
Where does the emptiness go when someone falls into it?
Where are all the questions to your answers?
Where does all the love go when there’s no one to feel it?
I think you should stick around and find out
That I will still love you in the morning
Where do all the lies go once the truth is told?
Where does a hole go when you fill it?
Where does the soul go when the body dies?
I guess that you wanted to find out
More than you wanted to see me in the morning
|
||||
11. |
Cloudbirth
03:26
|
|||
12. |
Folding
04:43
|
|||
|
You fold your hands like a napkin
Perfect angles to hide the stains
And you fold your hands like bed sheets
You put them away where no one can soil them
How does it feel to live without being alive?
How does it feel to cry only in the night?
But as we talk, something sacred burns
Red, acrid ferns against the skyline
Your words, they come prepackaged in quotation marks
But I will not repeat them; no I will not repeat them
But your lips are curved like a high strung bow
Your teeth know how to sharpen these secondhand ideas
How does it feel to live without being alive?
How does it feel to cry only in the night?
But as we talk, something sacred burns
Red, acrid ferns against the skyline
|
||||
13. |
Prey
03:12
|
|||
|
Pray to your syllables
Pray to your nouns and your adverbs
Pray to sonata form
Pray to the coda and recapitulation
Pray to your name
Pray to your number
Pray for deliverance
From the thoughts inside your head
Monsters under the bed
And all that you dread having to do
Pray to the lobbyists
Pray to the house and the senate
Pray to your signature
Pray to your paycheck and all that it will buy
Pray to your rules
Pray to your structures
Pray for deliverance
From the knowledge in your spine
Of chances you’ve declined
While trying to buy some more time
Because lately you’ve been realizing
Time is short and you’ve been disguising
Everything you love the most
The end is near but you’re still sleeping
Fighting off an urge for weeping
Now’s the time to let it out
So bow your head and end this drought
|
||||
14. |
The Kitchen
03:51
|
|||
|
I want to reach the ceiling of our bodies
Unscrew all the bulbs from their sockets
Something will sputter, something will glow
Something will sputter, but we’ll never know
There is a light behind our eyes
It’s not on the circuit, but we’ll never know
Lying down, face on the kitchen parquet
I look for mouse holes while you count the flies
You find seventeen dead and three alive
I’ve got sheets on my head since you’ve arrived
Something will sputter, something will glow
Something will sputter, but we’ll never know
There is a light behind our eyes
It’s not on the circuit, but we’ll never know
|
||||
15. |
E
02:04
|
|||
If you like Flower of Industry, you may also like:
Lovely, delicate acoustic music with rich, narrative lyrics that play out more like short stories than songs.
go to album
Not A Party At All
by Lambs & Wolves
Charming German indie pop with the keen melodic sensibilities and melancholic undercurrent of some of the style's best practitioners.
go to album
Virtual Heaven
by Infinity Crush
Despite its themes of isolation and loneliness, Caroline White's latest batch of folk-pop confessionals is an LP brimming with confidence.
go to album
somebody had to
by phoneswithchords
The gentle lo-fi songs on the latest phoneswithchords LP develop their granular sketches of childhood and coming of age into full portraits.
go to album
The Bear And The Barn Owl
by Benjamin
featured on Bandcamp Radio Jun 23, 2015
go to album
The haunting new record from Canadian folk artist Avi C. Engel bridges old and new traditions with a minimalist approach.
go to album
The latest from the UK’s Chris Brain is a gorgeously wrought album of tender acoustic folk music.
go to album
