11 Songs with Brilliant Lyrics

I thought I might take a moment and list eleven songs that give me hope in the lyricists of our generation. A tried to refrain from simply listing eleven Damien Rice songs...


Here goes:

Damien Rice - Elephant

"Well this has got to die
I said, this has got to stop
This has got to lie down
With someone else on top
Well, you can keep me pinned
It's easier to tease
But you can't paint an elephant
Quite as good as she"


Brandon Flowers - Playing with Fire

"I see his calling as the channel of invention,
I will not blush if others see it as a crime.
However dangerous the road, however distant,
These things won't compromise the will of the design."


Ray LaMontagne - Empty

"Of these cutthroat busted sunsets
These cold and damp white mornings I have grown weary
If through my cracked and dusty dimestore lips
I spoke these words out loud would no one hear me"


Counting Crows - Round Here

"Maria came from Nashville with a suitcase in her hand
she said she'd like to meet a boy who looks like Elvis
she walks along the edge of where the ocean meets the land
just like she's walking on a wire in the circus
she parks her car outside of my house and takes her clothes off
says she's close to understanding Jesus
she knows she's just a little misunderstood
she has trouble acting normal when she's nervous"


Arctic Monkeys - The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala

"I took the batteries out my mysticism and put them in my thinking cap."


Damien Rice - The Connoisseur of Great Excuse

"Of all the foolish things to do
I became a connoisseur of great excuse
And my pessimistic past the blame
Will never make this go away
Of all the foolish things I've said
That keep me sleepy almost dead
I'm sorry if I've let you down
My eyes were closed, they're open now"


Bright Eyes - The Trees Get Wheeled Away

"So believe you're who you are
and stay in character,
but at the end of the play
the audience walks away.
And you'll be shivering cold on a well lit stage."


Mumford & Sons - After the Storm

"Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot."

Iron & Wine - Passing Afternoon

"There are things we can't recall, blind as night that finds us all
Winter tucks her children in, her fragile china dolls
But my hands remember hers, rolling 'round the shaded ferns
Naked arms, her secrets still like songs I'd never learned

There are names across the sea, only now I do believe
Sometimes, with the windows closed, she'll sit and think of me
But she'll mend his tattered clothes and they'll kiss as if they know
Her baby sleeps in all our bones, so scared to be alone"


John Mayer - Covered in Rain

"From fireworks to fireplaces
Summer stole what fall replaces
And now we're people watching
All the people, people watching us right back
Standing by the missing signs
At the CVS, by the checkout line
She puts her quiet hands in mine,
Cause she's the brightest thing I've got"


Ray LaMontagne - Lesson Learned

"Well the truth it fell so heavy
Like a hammer through the room
That I could choose another over her
You always said I was an actor, baby
Guess in truth you thought me just amateur"

Trains

It's not supposed to be sad, but the more I read it the more it seems so. Oh well...

I close my eyes and it's like I am on a train heading out of the city, and as I look out the window another train goes flying past the opposite direction. For the briefest of moments I see each passenger's face, each trace of sorrow and regret. And I understand that the faces I see in the reflective windows of the adjacent empty cars are me and to close my eyes is to come to terms with the million different pictures of myself that I have created over the years. That is why I lie awake. That is when my eyes are open.

- Shaun

From 'In the Years of My Youth'

I have been toying for a long time with a story called 'In the Years of My Youth.' I'm not quite sure of its direction, but I know what I want it to eventually accomplish. I want to encapsulate an entire life into three distinct reminisces and examine how memory and loss shape who we are. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the latest draft:

In the years of my youth, before the pale sun rose on a day that I didn’t think of her, she wrote me a brief letter scribbled on the back of one of my papers. She hid it deep within the pages of the novel I was currently reading in the hopes that it would absorb the eloquence (or perhaps the gravity) of its surroundings. It didn’t have to. So simple was it, so very pure in its expression and belief, that it echoes in my head even now, long after the last lines of Milton and Fitzgerald have faded. She wrote:

‘There is nothing that I would rather read than something you wrote, something you thought and scribbled down on a napkin. You are so poetic, and if you don't use this gift from now until you die, I will be so sad. Even if you only ever write books, short stories, or poems for me to read, I will ask them from you for the rest of my life, no matter where it takes me. I wish that I could write like you.’

I came to the city to bury my father, but three bars and two strip clubs later I found myself in a Mayfair flat with a guy whose name I forget and a girl he kept calling “Missy.” I watched them put their tongues down each other’s throats for about two seconds before I grabbed a bottle of gin and made my way to the nearest room with a bed in it. I woke up ten hours later, in the bath-tub. Luckily, the funeral wasn’t for a few hours.

Death is a tricky thing. You live your life fearing your own, but when it comes for you, you realize that the only time you truly feared death is when it came for those you love. Being separated from the one you love is nothing if you don’t exist to feel the pain, but it is everything if you are the one holding the string of a popped balloon, or if you are left holding her hand in the silent room as the beeps that once belonged to her slowly fade away (with your reason), never to be heard again. I guess this is where I tell you that I’ve had a hard life, that death walks the hollow caverns of my memory. If I were any other character I’d spend paragraphs detailing the horrors of my childhood or the loss of my adulthood. But I will just tell you that I, like you, have loved and lost people all my life and leave it at that.

- Shaun

The road not I, but we, have travelled.

Not I, but we, have travelled

To where the sea meets distant lands;

My heart has traded hands

And my nerves unravelled

Like the ribbon of a child’s toy,

But none have found this thing

(this joy) to which we cling

With bony fingers

And dreams that linger

Like dust from Troy.

Instead we wander (long)

And ponder (longer),

Turn back and walk

the long road home

And talk behind thick curtains red,

In hushed and quiet tones.

Do you think we are alone?

When we know, I will tell you

And I will tell you when we know.

Not we, but I, have had a dream,

All white she seemed, as

Light poured around her

Wrist and hair, perhaps

I dreamed she walked on air.

No, she walked a gravel path,

Grey like clouds, it hath

No beginning, but an end in sight,

And to this end the road unravelled,

The road not I, but we, have travelled.

From 'A Short Story about Sex'

So I've been working on a little story about the few hours that pass in a single room between a prostitute and her customer. Yes, there is sex, but more importantly the story seeks to address the relationship between sex and love, society and humanity. Why do men act the way they do? Is God anywhere in the room? Anyway, the following is an excerpt from the story:

The room was bigger than Phillip expected but was stereotypically dirty and smelled strongly of sex. It was bare, except of a large bed against one wall with a lamp and table next to it. The lamp, Phillip noted, did not have a bulb in it, and the room was lit by a single overhead fixture.

- Do you want the lights on or off?

- Doesn’t matter.

She turned the light off. The room became dark for a moment, but as the light from the streetlamps filtered in through the blinds Phillip saw the room take shape again before him. It seemed more beautiful and mysterious now. What had at first seemed cold and impersonal became majestic in the faint light that vaguely outlined the shape of the room. Darkness has a way of taking the world and making it beautiful. As though our sense of sight is bias, and when you lessen the effect it has on our overall perception, we “see” things in an entirely different way. We see beauty where before we saw shame.

The woman moved in this beauty across the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

- Come here.

The man instinctively obeyed, walking slowly across the room to meet her. He looked at her, and she returned his gaze without any trace of shame. He had to try really hard before he picked up on the traces of feigned excitement. For the most part, she was entirely convincing and entirely desirable.

- How do you want me?

Curiously enough, the man had to really think about this question before he answered. At first he had assumed it would be like having sex with any other woman, except that it wasn’t free. Only just in that moment did he realize the enormous difference between this woman and every woman before her. How do you want me? I want you in every way imaginable. I want everything that I have been afraid to try all these years, and I want everything that I was denied. He saw before him not a woman who had to be wooed and dealt with carefully, but an object entirely for his pleasure and completely at his disposal. But habit took over.

He stood directly in front of her, looking down on into her eyes as his heart and mind struggled to keep up with situation. In the seven years that he had been married to his wife he had never felt such a rush of excitement before their forays in the bedroom. But now he felt as though he stood on a cliff at the edge of the world, and that stepping off it would result not in a violent death but in a rebirth, a leaving behind the old and falling helplessly into the new. Because of that, he kissed her. Not aggressively or especially physically, but with a sincerity that she had no idea existed. She laughed genially.

- I’ve never been kissed like that by a customer before.

- Well, I’ve never been a ‘customer’ before, so I’m not quite sure of the proper protocol.

They both smiled. A car honked in the street outside the one window of the room.

- Shaun

10 Books Under 200 Pages

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

C.S. Lewis


Everyone loves a nice, long book. Some people even enjoy such works as Infinite Jest and Ulysses. But now that I've finished university and am free to read whatever I'd like, I have re-fallen in love with the short novel. There is something beautiful about an author who can create a world and populate it with characters that we become attached to without testing our resolve with 30+ pages describing a squash match (don't get me wrong, I love Ian McEwan as much as the next guy, as you'll see by the list below).

That being said, I thought I make a list of 10 books that I can recommend that are under 200 pages of thereabouts. It's certainly not definitive in anyway, but some of them might be worth reading.

The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) - No novel for me captures the American idea of reinventing yourself to earn love more perfectly than The Great Gatsby. The scene of Daisy crying into a closet full of Jay Gastby's expensive shirts is perfect in every way.

Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores (Marquez) - Around 100 pages and focused on 'love' between a 90-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl, Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores distills the famous descriptions of Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera down to concentrated, material language of exquisite potency.

The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway) - It's longer than 200 pages, but it reads like a never-ending short story filled with wild nights out and crazy nights in. "To hell with women anyway. To hell with you Brett Ashley!"

Amsterdam (McEwan) - Although it won the Booker Prize, Amsterdam wasn't my favorite McEwan novel when I first read it. But it has stuck in my mind with surprising resilience over the last few years, and its characters and situations seem to continually apply to my life. A book that can do that deserves reading.

Short Short Stories (Eggers) - "He didn't want to do this flying alone; he would rather not do it than do it without her. But if he asked her to fly with him, and she expressed reservations, or was not inspired, would he stay with her? Could he? He decides that he would not. If she does not drive in the van with the wings carefully folded, he will have to leave, smile and leave, and then he will look again. But when and if he finds another companion, he knows his plan will not be for flying. It will be another plan with another person, because if he goes flying close to the earth it will be with her."

A Grief Observed (Lewis) - It shook me to the core the first time I read it, hunched over an unbought copy on the couch of the Bulldog Cafe. Perhaps anyone who believes in God and has lost someone in their life should read it.

The Stranger (Camus) - One of the most accessible works of philosophical fiction I've come across. I've read it a few times, most recently while on a train through the Welsh countryside, and if I am not affected by the surprisingly compelling description of one man's battle against the sun, I certainly enjoy his encounters with the other characters.

Heart of Darkness (Conrad) - You've been told to read it for class; do so. Then try reading in on your own, without particular concern for Victorian Imperialism or the three layers of the psyche, and see if it doesn't accomplish an amazing amount of storytelling in such a short time.

The Waste Land (Eliot) - Though it's not a novel, Eliot's epic poem about the chaos of modernity is something that must be read by anyone who has struggled to give voice to seemingly unexplainable feelings. "The awful daring of a moment's surrender / Which an age of prudence can never retract / By this, and this only, we have existed."

Disgrace (Coetzee) - As English professors, most of us have had sex with one of our attractive female students at some point in our career. The trouble with David Lurie is that he refuses to accept the disgrace of publicly apologizing for his actions. Instead, he visits his daughter's farm in rural South Africa, where he encounters an entirely new definition of the term.

Read one. Better yet, turn off the television and read them all.

- Shaun

Saturday at the Old Vic; Sunday at HTB

Let me just say that the last few weeks have been really busy. With four exams coming up in the next three weeks, I have been trying to focus my energies much more on revising than any sort of creative output. I did, however, want to take a moment and discuss two happenings of this weekend.

Saturday night I had the pleasure of going to the theatre with a dear friend of mine to see a revival of Tom Stoppard's 'The Real Thing.' With the exception of, perhaps, one less-than-believable breakdown, the play was one of the most amazing acts of theatre I have ever experience. The story, which focuses on the relationship between two couples (and their subsequent infidelities), slowly turns into a discussion not only of the discernible truths of love and passion but also of the very heart of the art form it represents: words. By featuring a playwright as one of the main characters, the play questions what it is to be a writer, and takes the audience on a trip through the highs and lows of love and writing. The actor playing Henry (I think it was Toby Stephens) was fantastic in his confident yet eventually vulnerable portrayal of a writer with curious morals and a firm belief in the romantic. While the play may not have left your with much in the way of narrative mystery, it somehow managed to entertain (due largely to the unrivaled wit of Stoppard) while still engaging the audience and challenging them to question the very ideas of 'being a writer' or 'being in love.' All in all, I wish you could have seen it.

The other happening of which I was a part of was the Sunday service at Holy Trinity Brompton. The service was focused on worship, and the message was given by the two worship pastors there, Tim Hughes and Al Gordon. As a bit of a worship leader, I found it extremely helpful just to listen to two of my favorite worship leaders explain their thoughts on portraying God through music and life. I particularly liked it when Tim confessed to frequently allowing the passion of his worship to reflect his personal preference for the song being played ('If I have to sing this chorus one more time I am going to hurt someone' etc). But the root of the message, as I continually have to be reminded, is that worship is more than just leading a congregation through songs on a Sunday, it is teaching a generation that there is nothing more beautiful and nothing more worth our time and praise than a God that loves and cares about us. And as leaders, when we remember that, we are on our way to changing the world through God's love, which is what we should be trying to do. Whether it is through leading worship, writing poetry, or simply serving someone other than myself for once, I want to live my life in continual worship.

One final note. The past few weeks I have been seized with the desire to help share people's art and creativity with the world (or at least their immediate neighbors). The following ideas are, for some reason, on my mind:

- Compiling good creative writing from people who fancy themselves writers and presenting it to others in a readable fashion.
- Infusing VCF with a dose of creativity or art, however that might happen.
- Holding some sort of art-themed event in which people come to enjoy a variety of art in all different forms in one beautiful setting.
- Creating some way in which to exhibit the amazing photography of people that I know.

Anyways, I will be heading home in three weeks!

- Shaun