1. |
Neptune
05:18
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Bodies aren’t enough to keep us happy
And shelter’s not enough to make a home.
The axis is enough to keep us spinning
And Europa gives us hope we’re not alone.
The biopsy reveals it’s all a cycle
The follow up is going back in time.
They say the worst is easily prevented,
The quantum degradation should be fine!
If I drink the herbs is that like killing Hitler?
Is surgery a retroactive cure?
With cells’ potential wild replication,
Is medicine a shatter in the mirror?
Lift me from this cosmic cycle!
Take me to my sun’s arrival in Neptune.
But only if I get to go alone.
It’s not enough to merely stifle
Everything I felt inside while listening
To eagles tell me time is just a lie
Does anyone know what we’re sposed to do now?
Is middle age the calm before the storm?
Do we sit at home until we see the doctor
And the doctor says we’re never going home?
And what if all it leads to is forgetting?
The life you lived recedes into the plaque?
Genetic disposition notwithstanding-
You’ll never get your youthful wisdom back.
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2. |
To Move the Earth
07:41
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The sequoia on Aloha
Watched the hill become a cliff
And the salty water flowed
And made peninsulas from isthmuses
The mudslides held together
From the Himalayan fruit.
She’s invasive - growing wild and getting
Blood on our boots.
The redwood at the high school
Stands alone above the rail
Growing rings at a clip
But still slower than the youth jail.
Dropping needles on the asphalt
As developers stand by -
Waiting for the prices and the children to get high.
We don’t know how to live here
Even though we were born here.
Ancient seeds that were sown here
1000 years ago
Risk suffocation
From our atmosphere
They can’t work hard enough to breathe away the mess that we create.
The hemlocks of the freeway
Just south of downtown
Backlit by the mountain
Sheltering my friends that need the
Makeshift homes of plastic
On a public patch of grass
Branches more reliable
Than property and cash.
The oaks have always been here
Even now they line the streets
But the overstory’s growing back
Growing back the habitat
I’d give up all the concrete
to the mushrooms and the roots
If I knew we wouldn’t kill it all
To make the dream come true.
The forest in the front yard
Full of firs and yews and spruce
Planted by some hippie kids
In 89 - and soon it will
Replace the grey McMansion
With mahonia and ferns.
God will always win unless
The flippers get there first.
But the Douglas firs can see the future.
They knew it all before we got here.
Imagine how time moves when you’re
1000 years old
And if you thrived before the hills were clear?
A century’s enough to heal the wounds that we create.
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3. |
Jeffrey Pine
04:23
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Step up real close and smell the resin.
(But first put out your cigarette)
You did this in high school while I
Had numbers in my head
Your pine named Jeffrey
And mine ponderosa
Turpentine for me.
My lovers named for pines and castles
Could only show me sapwood
The heartwood too dark for me.
I guess I’m nomadic
The scorched earth behind me
I wish you had told me you wouldn’t follow me.
When I got to Lassen
I thought I was north enough
The scent of the bark betrayed me
But the butterscotch we loved
Is petrol
Known to cause explosions
if you set the heartwood on fire.
The lover named Jeffrey
The other with no name
The man with the metal heart and death on the brain
Everyone’s lying
They all think I’m buying it
But you played the long game
Loved me the wrong way
Like ayahuasca and magic
My lover from the desert, my castle!
Addicted to the resin
But the compound too volatile for you
What will you do now, alone?
Im inheriting the earth
As you’re stuck smelling pines on your own.
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4. |
Expectation
07:06
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When I count all the table’s rings
And the cracks in the sheen
It tells me if I’m lost
Or if this is all a dream.
I don’t think it’s meant for me,
That suburban domesticity;
Because there is way too much to lose if
I’ve got what I need.
I know my plans will backfire
As soon as I acquire a single family home
and a 9-5 to define me
The men don’t understand
That this lot is made of sand.
Forged between volcanoes
And someone else’s land.
Every stake in the ground
And the old hearth the plumber found
Can vanish in an instant
If we walk too loud
Because the cancer is waiting
It lives inside my cells and it watches me pretend
That i’ll see the end
Of the century.
CHORUS 1
Is this love,
To imagine tragedy
Because it can’t be this good?
Cut me off
From my childhood ecstasy
I’d forget if I could
Just to be free
Of precedent
And de-program
My expectations
VERSE 2
I told you you’d lose the trail
But the markers never fail
To show how far you’ve strayed
And how much will (it will take to)..
Walk to the other side
Where the old growth still survives.
Here just dying thistles
And it’s too hot to cry.
And the map won’t save you.
It only shows the roads
And the path we left behind
Can we find our way back
To the table?
CHORUS 2
Is this life,
Intermissions and dramas
That last all night?
Wake me up
From my childhood trauma
The wrongs that feel right
Is this life,
Intermissions and dramas
That last all night?
Wake me up
From my childhood trauma
The wrongs that feel right
And free
Of intervention.
Should I defy
Expectation?
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5. |
Methuselah
05:47
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The bristlecone pines
Wind their bark towards heaven
They’ve seen it all
Their cells are writ with permanence
But here I am afraid
That I don’t have long
Here I am afraid of the “big one.”
Take me down to the basin
Or where the aspens are quaking
Tell me I’m an animal
Tell me I come from Methuselah.
VERSE 2
We burn this shit down
We make garbage out of all of it
We’ll never know
That our bodies are part of it.
We eat and breathe our sins
Until we’re all alone.
All in the name of progress
But there are ghosts in the fault lines.
I’ve heard them talk to me my whole life.
They told me don’t be afraid to die
But don’t fuck up the time you have on this side.
VERSE 3
this will never end.
Your soul will come round again.
As a member of our swimming pod or better - a needle on a pine.
VERSE 4
A week before the equinox it snowed
The bubble was bursting but we didn’t know
All I could see was you crying
As you turned into a whale
Sometimes I ask you
To give me a sign
To show you’ll be around my whole life
And then you tell the trees to talk to me
No better mother than a redwood.
VERSE 5
This will never end.
Your soul will come round again.
As a member of a dying herd or better - a needle on a pine.
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6. |
The End of the Line
05:38
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To incubate life
Of a different kind
And run up a tab
Of things I didn’t try....
Daughter do you need to exist?
Wish I had a mother to advise me on this.
Not enough time
To give you a life like mine.
Still I face the judgment
At the end of the line.
PRE-CHORUS
How many generations died
Before I could make this silly choice of mine?
CHORUS
I’ll just lay around
And wear my crown
Of cedar boughs
And all of the songs I gestated
No doubts
Will be found
Among the thousand ways
That my blood is creative.
Not enough time
To be tired
The branches I’ve picked
Could expire.
What’s the difference between a story and a child?
One you can lose and the other’s too wild
To tell us the secrets on how to be
When we leave the stasis
Of the Holocene.
VERSE 2
We have a home
And an extra room
And I’ve made a garden
With food enough for two.
It’s hard to justify
The duplication of my
genes
When death came so early
To the predecessors of me.
PRE-CHORUS
And I
Can’t promise that I’ll be the woman
You need
And I
Don’t suspect we’ll have the planet
You need
To survive
CHORUS
I’ll just lay around
And wear my crown
Of cedar boughs
And all of the songs I gestated
No doubts
Will be found
Among the thousand ways
That my blood is creative.
Not enough time
To be tired
The branches I’ve picked
Could expire.
What’s the difference between a story and a child?
One you can lose and the other’s too wild
To tell us the secrets on how to be
When we leave the stasis
Of the Holocene.
I’ll just sit around
And wear my crown
Of cedar boughs
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7. |
Lookout
05:38
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photos of the senior prom
When we were all together
when we all thought
that we would live forever
Life has changed so much that I forgot to call you when I
Fell in love
And had a child
And thought we’d live forever
Got a job
And bought a house
And promised I’d be better
Why did I move out of town?
I miss the smell of puget sound
Before the gravensteins fall to the ground
Is anyone home?
Did anyone stay home?
You only held my hand
We talked about the weather
But you were there when the Nisqually shook the river
When the planes fell from the sky and hit the towers
You were there
Beneath the desks
We thought we’d die together
And as we lay you down to rest
I think about the letter.
Blue blotted ink on those college-ruled sheets
Where you wrote everything down you couldn’t say to me.
In ‘23
There is a photo I’ll see
Where your handwriting never looked so dear to me!
And I could never look you square in the eye because
Those blue crypts and furrows are what I’ll see when I die, when I die, when I die
When I die at least I’ll know that it’s my time to be free,
To stand on the ridge, look out, and count every tree I came to know, every projectile seed they’ve sown,
As my friend, as my mom, as my husband, as my own.
As the clearest window we all have into the great unknown.
Just look out!
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Kaley Lane Eaton Seattle, Washington
Avante-garde classical composer? Freak-folk singer-songwriter? Postmodern jazz interloper?
For artists like
Kaley Lane Eaton who paint outside the lines, there are seemingly endless boxes to check, but few name-brand comparisons. Joni Mitchell, Björk, Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson. Eaton’s “disconcertingly lovely” (Seattle Weekly) compositions are “unconfined by genres” (V13 Media).
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