February Double A-Side: The Colossus

Mastered by Andrew Katz

Art by Billis Helg

Couldn't decide which track I liked more, so this month is a double A-side!

Writing: My schedule this month was shaped around a weeklong visit to New York for promotional work in advance of the album. Before leaving, I started work on a song pretty different from this one called “Good Hard Work”, with a mellow chorus and style. As I worked on it, it developed a verse melody that was more ardent and fierce than the chorus; this verse ended up being the more interesting piece, and I abandoned the original chorus and followed this new energy. I was inspired by the book of Tobit and the book of Exodus, and started writing lyrics about people who leave behind all of their known lives to go somewhere else, on a thin promise - something I’ve seen in my own life and in friends’. 

New York City, in past visits, struck me as a harbor of decadence and high-powered capitalism. This time, decompressing after the flight, I started researching the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus” went straight to my heart:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This was a different vision of New York than I had seen. That towering statue, that world-famous emblem of the city and the country, kept its back turned to the skyscrapers, to Times Square and Wall Street, and held its torch for the poor who gathered in its subways and streets. If these people weren’t represented by the city’s billboards and advertisements, they were still represented in her. I kept that poem close to my heart throughout the week. 

In this song, Lady Liberty collapses into the sea, and the “empire” seems to dominate. But I don’t think it’s that simple. When old structures collapse, what was truly within them - good or evil - emerges into the light. If a monument to liberty falls, then what remains is what people truly need - the human hearts and human hands that can comfort the tired and the poor, ushering all of us into an unknown future.

Tracks:

1: electric guitar/vocal

2: percussion on acoustic guitar

3: acoustic guitar

4: vocal

Lyrics:

New York is losing its vantage

Into the Atlantic 

The punishment of your midwives

Service for brick and mortar

Your temple of empire

Your purchasing power is your right to survive

What else could be expected?

Someone is sending

Something unknown into our lives

Far from the storied fables

The voice of an angel

Sends the strong into a terrored state

She holds the sword of anger

And the face of a stranger

Can you trust her to know the way?

Don’t bother setting the table

Eat in haste now

Mark the lintel and lock the door

Tonight I cry, I cry alone,

weak and huddled, far from home,

As the colossus falls into the sea

With the light she held for you and me

Never a time quite like this

The language of lightning

Is never before and never again

And if the heart is harder

The greater the power

All of his chariots and all of his men

Stilled and silent

The ending of violence

Someone turned the TV off

Tonight alone, alone I cry

Dying because I didn’t die

When the colossus fell into the sea

She took the lightning bolt for you and me

How many times she tried before

To lead us where there was no war,

Where night could not eclipse the day

How many times we fell away