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about

This is kind of a song about everything. It's a journey through struggle while coping with bouts of hopelessness and depression. Mostly it's an expression of the fragile, conditional hope being carefully nurtured by many who have been in these interconnecting fights for justice and liberation long enough to suffer its cycles, and who have experienced more pain than is reasonable for anyone to endure. This is offered with the hope that you find ways to crystallize that pain into something indestructible and life-affirming. Bless you for all that you are.

lyrics

I didn't want to move to California where it's always dry
On the other side of a mountain range with the fires raging high
Where the rivers are choked with concrete to shunt the rain out to the sea
If I'm gonna die that's not the place I'd choose for me

And in their millions, teeming masses, struggling to catch their breath
Would push you down beneath the water if it meant a chance to rest
Where the fault lines won't stop groaning in the bedrock that was broke
In the path of a tsunami is a relentless, tortured hope

Like the "ghost wolves" with no families, or the cougars moving east
Or the migratory songbirds who tomorrow cease to be
Or the bison in the paddock with a butcher at its throat
We did it to the world around us as we did it to our own

And in their millions, teeming masses who don't have words but still know fear
Know longing and the pain of losing when their kinships disappear
And if the machines won't stop spinning, then these bodies are the brakes
It's extinction or restoration, and that's the choice we get to make

I don't know why I don't leave the city and these people who I fear
I don't know why this river called me and the wind carried me here
There must be something that I'm doing, though its shape I don't quite see
For now the lilacs on the night breeze comfort me

And their millions, teeming masses, who don't know the power they hold
When the screens are always telling them "You're better off alone.
Every commons gets evicted, every culture gentrifies
And every year another loved one tires and chooses suicide."

But this angry, bitter hope inside which never quite congeals
Whispers "the ways we hurt each other show the ways we've got to heal,"
And I'll hear my spirit ringing where the chisel left this cleft
Between the hammer and the anvil, there is only singing left

And in our millions, teaming masses, building toward we don't know what
But it might be a better future than the present that we've got
Where we listen to each other and let the rhythms guide our breath
And then we'll face this fear together, a broken but a singing Left
And then we'll face this fear together, hand in hand, the Singing Left

credits

from In The Ruins They've Left Us, We'll Plant Gardens Still, released December 23, 2020
Vocals, Guitar, and Songwriting: R Young
Harmonium: Sam Adams
Mandolin: Emmett Doyle

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Wooden Shoe Ramblers Minneapolis, Minnesota

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