LYRICS

From the 2007 album, “VANISH:”

24fps
This Winter
Chiaroscuro
NecRomance
Papillon
Memento Mori
The Reformation
Cardiac Thanatosis
Dust
The Grand Imperial Cirque de l'Enfer
The Wicked One

24fps

Sitting in the theater,
Images flash by and she's glued to the screen.
Laughing in her seat, and weeping in the aisle;
A comedy bittersweet, a tragedy incomplete.

Twenty-four frames per second. This isn't the story she imagined.
She tries to rewrite the script but the set's already been stripped.

Watching from the balcony;
Pressure from commitments makes her want to implode
And the vacuum of ennui pulls her to explode—
A vicious stasis, a single frame indefinite.

Twenty-four frames per second and her story flickers on.
Time to splice her own frames in, change the reel—
Her true character revealed.

Lying in this coffin,
The actor in repose like an Oscar mannequin.
Was every line worth reading, every scene worth doing,
Every hollow praise worth earning?

Twenty-four frames per second like twenty-four hours per day.
Every frame was precious and she let them all slip away.

This Winter

Tomorrow's new dawn breaks the silver frost,
But today's gray canvas makes me feel lost.
It smells like falling stars every time she comes near;
They crash in my eyes and burn up my tears.
A colorless sky obscures the heart on my sleeve,
Entreating a reprieve, while watching her grieve.
It's getting late and dark and cold and I want to explain,
Though, such a thing's a hollow, dire and worthless refrain.

This winter inside—
Deliverance denied where bloodless blossoms wilt and die.
Go—Stop snowing on my head.
Go—I don't want your rain on my back.
Go—Stop making me feel numb.
Go—I need you to let me forgive me.

Through a blizzard of regrets I toss and turn and thrash.
Flakes fall on my tongue and they taste just like ash.
Each obsidian raindrop that collides with my skin
Is a souvenir of pain from the black rain of shame.
Every burning bridge's warmth is cause to apologize,
Even though her trust is lying covered with flies.
I am become my own indignant Montresor;
Brick by repentant brick, sealing off my hollow core.

This winter inside:
Her mercy purified where I keep me crucified
Go—Stop blowing in the windows.
Go—I don't want your chill on me.
Go—Stop pounding me with rain.
Go—I need you to let me forgive...

This endless season of guilt.
This aimless shambling in a cage I built.
I swore I'd make her fall in love with me again,
But she always has loved me.

Go—Stop bleeding me with frozen knives.
Go—I don't need you cutting me.
So go—Stop shredding all my self-esteem.
Go—I need you to let me forgive…me.

Chiaroscuro

Hanging by a thread
Giving it back some time
Stretched out on the bed
This wraith haunting my life
Giving you back some time
And listening to what you've said
The wraith haunting my life
With cuts that never bled.

Spilled cabernet stains a Rorschach blot
That we use to assess our deepest thoughts.
Confessions and apologies seem maladroit
And yet, through their aperture, a black and white snapshot.

Listening to what you've said,
That familiar line:
“These cuts that never bled
Obfuscate the signs.”
“Hanging by a thread,”
That familiar line.
Disregard the signs
Laid out on the bed.

Listening to your body hum in the dark,
That sonar so I always know where you are.
Shadows from the gaslight form a question mark;
All the answers are hidden in your stars.
Stark, sallow light burns holes in our haunted space,
Shadows thrown envelop us in a velvet grace.
Words are inadequate shoes for the steps that we retrace,
So, emotions are dragged down a worm-eaten staircase.

NecRomance

So it's late and there you are at the end of the room,
Next to a photograph of you before
Prozac pillows smothered you in their dark spring bloom—
a downy sleep apnea for a waiting tomb.

Take off that funeral dress,
It isn't like you to overdress.
Who are you trying to depress,
When you know that I love you nonetheless?

Your shroud of white lace and wisteria
Makes dying in my arms anesthesia—
Our capitulating hysteria.
Into the hereafter: our dark utopia.

Take off that funeral dress,
Who are you trying to impress?
In the absence of my caress
Know that I love you nonetheless.

All the décor gaudy like it's Christian Dior,
But it's only you that I darkly adore.
I'm Edgar Allan to your wilted Lenore.
Un bel amour, allé à une belle mort!

Take off that funeral dress,
You know that it causes me distress.
What do you want me to profess,
When you know that I love you nonetheless?
Take off that funeral dress,
Who are you trying to impress?
In the absence of my caress
Know that I love you nonetheless.

Papillon

Standing in that café,
Not knowing what to say.
Everyone was watching
But didn't see.
Every butterfly was watching
But didn't see.
“I wasn't sure
whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
or am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.”
~Zhuangzi (399 - 295 B.C.)

It is time for a new Belle Époque;
It is time for our absinthe-drenched dreams to breathe and dance
under the overcast gray canvas of our luminous skies.

Memento Mori (instrumental)

This song is among the very first songs I wrote when I was in my teens. I wrote this for my senior project in high school, although then it was only two acoustic guitars playing in harmony. Years later I took it and added the piano (which plays the primary melody) and split the guitar parts into two guitars hard panned left and right. I also added some keyboards and electronic percussion. This seems to be a piece that people either go “Is it even finished?” or “That was amazing!” What do you think?

The Reformation

Trawling the past for answers to the questions of darker days.
And there's a thirst for more than the pale truth betrays...
...For old clichés
...For conclusions delayed...

The more you “know” yourself, the less of you I know.
Or rather, the more of you I miss.

Serendipity's a disguise for your destiny's slow demise.
This entropy is rendering your autonomy compromised.
The dichotomy just clarifies that discoveries are made of lies.
Identity goes hand in hand with gullibility; hence, the new you.

Mapping the walls within the fortuneteller's maze.
And paraphrasing your indiscretions in a language out of phase
Like withered bouquets, like desire's decay.

The more you “know” yourself the less of me you know.
Or rather, the more of me you'll miss.

Serendipity's a disguise for your destiny's slow demise.
This entropy is rendering your autonomy compromised.
The dichotomy just clarifies that discoveries are made of lies.
Identity goes hand in hand with gullibility;
Hence, the new you.

What's never been addressed, or gotten off your chest
Leaves you dispossessed in your own skin.
This plea to transcend, an excuse to pretend.
New beginnings are just another end.
With a dram of nepenthe, this “you” is a fait accompli.

Serendipity's a disguise for your destiny's slow demise.
This entropy is rendering your autonomy compromised.
The dichotomy just clarifies that discoveries are made of lies.
Identity goes hand in hand with gullibility;
hence, the new you.

Cardiac Thanatosis

Thanatosis: Playing dead; death feigning; tonic immobility in the presence of a predator.
The word “Thanatopsis” means “a meditation upon death.”

Love has always bade me come into her drowning pool,
But to be fair I have always been her willing ghoul.
After the last time I had to be preemptive,
I had to be aggressive and decisive.
I'm taking some drastic steps in prudence of
That terrible, lingering force that they call “love.”

My beating vulnerability is buried six-feet under swaying grass.
Lying there in dreaming suspension, waiting for the summer storms to pass.

I've renounced the need to ever feel or even care.
Now, no one can break something that simply isn't there.
With a little bit of anesthetic I cut it out with surprising ease
And carried it beyond the woods' bastions of crow-filled trees.
I've taken these drastic steps in prudence of
That terrible, lingering force that they call “love.”

My beating vulnerability is buried six-feet under autumn leaves
Under all the webs of heartache that desire always seems to weave.

My beating vulnerability is buried six-feet under winter's snow,
Lying there in cynical depression, safe inside the earth and stone and cold.
My dark valentine is buried with my insecurity,
And now that I'm free from love's claws
No other hooks will ever take me.

Dust

Beggar's velvet covers every blue morning
Kisses from the dust witch bring me to my knees.
Now it seems that seconds and minutes mean everything
The world is obscured in a gaussian blur and my name's written in the dust.
Smothered in uncertainties and sideways calumnies
I reflect on the course of life and its fractal impurities.

I have stood on the shores of this insipid sea of bleach
I have watched my colors bleed out all along the beach
Time accelerates rusty gears, groaning in my ears
A cruel chronology tolls as days disappear.

Ghosts haunt the fields where I have lain with ambivalence
Shattered turns left untaken have indeed made the difference
So the days disintegrate and cover me in their grit
The relentless grind drags on and drags me along with it.

I have walked among the graves in fluorescent lit office stalls
I have stared at memo boards and dreamt beyond those walls
I have lingered in the steps of this desolation waltz
Danced to a requiem played on the wings of moths.

Bathed in the powder from pulverized yesterdays
The cremains of desires set ablaze
The lint off of tattered memoirs
And walking through the embers of dying stars
To stare through a myopic soot of ashes and remnants
But I'll burn like a phoenix rising from the pyre to eclipse the gasping litanies,
the impending catastrophes, the injuries and apologies no longer worth mourning
to burn like a comet crashing in the ocean....

I will close the incomplete circles of my life
I will dance through a thousand ballrooms filled with idyllic light
No more will I suffocate in this atmosphere so stale
Gem-like flames will envelope me as I lift this dusty veil.

The Grand Imperial Cirque de l'Enfer (instrumental)

Think: “the Devil's waltz.” This piece was inspired by countless listenings to Thomas Newman's “To the Shock of Miss Louise” on The Lost Boys soundtrack. I'd always wanted to do something like that in 3/4 time, and one day while noodling around on my 7-string bass I came up with the hammered/tapped line that forms the basis of the song. Originally, I stacked a couple of acoustic guitar lines and some keyboards onto it before it started taking on the gothic calliope feel it has. When my hard drive crashed in early 2006 erasing the original versions of all the songs, I had to re-record, re-sequence, re-arrange…basically the whole nine yards. By that time I'd gotten ahold of some new software and I ended up doing this song entirely with synthesizers. I do, however, play the bass part on the rare occasion that I do this one live.

The Wicked One

I remember the night they came to bring me the bad news,
Dire tidings from the monkeybats.
And I couldn't believe what they said,
I wouldn't believe she was gone,
Taken out by some country bumpkin BRAT!
In the silent sadness of loss I'm trying not to scream
As my world melts away like the girl of my dreams.
And it seems that falling apart at the seams is
De rigueur for all the days stretching ahead of me….

I've been asking why you had it in for my spooky girl
Who's only sin was being slightly odd.
OK, so she was awfully damn strange.
But in this world she was real
Unlike you, “The Great and Powerful” fraud.
What's with the ax to grind that drives your angsty little agenda?
Was it 'cause you couldn't score with Glinda?
Whatever the reason may be, you've taken something from me
And replaced it with a gaping hole that grows….

I hate you for the way you took her away from me.
I hate you for the promises she couldn't keep.
Is it really so hard to believe that someone out there loved her?
Is it really so hard to see that the wicked one is you?

Sometimes, it feels as if a bomb went off inside
And it's still ringing in my ears.
Through my blasted heart, I feel nothing;
I have been etherized with tears.
And everyone everywhere is singing that song
That horrid tune, the one that goes, “Ding dong,
The Wicked Witch is Dead!” Now everyone gets along
Well, most of you...the rest of us write songs that go:

I hate you for the way you took her away from me.
I hate you for the promises she couldn't keep.
Is it really so hard to believe that someone out there loved her?
Is it really so hard to see that the wicked one is you?

What kind of world is this where a spineless feline conspires
With a wicker dunce and a heartless robot
And a little girl from the sky?
What a motley band of assassins
Stumbling down the yellow cobblestone road towards her home.
And I awake many nights terrified
That I'm the one they want, that I'm the next to go.

I hate you for the way you took her away from me.
I hate you for the promises she couldn't keep.
Is it really so hard to believe that someone out there loved her?
Is it really so hard to see that the wicked one is you?
I hate you, I hate Oz, I hate your Emerald City.
I don't need you or your empty and worthless pity.
I am hate, I am spite, I am the one who'll take her place—
I'd like to introduce you to the Wicked Warlock of the West!