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Sentimental War | Give Up the Ghost
Sentimental War

SENTIMENTAL WAR
1. Water Under The Bridge
2. New Man
3. Problem Child
4. Famous Feelings
5. Blue Flame
6. Flashing Blue
7. Sober Country
8. Day of the Dead
9. Kiss and Tell
10. Lost in Love
11. Class War
12. Final Hour
13. Holding Out
14. Monkey Farm
15. Silent Spring
16. Swan Song
17. Same Old Stories


Water Under The Bridge Harlem Heights Top of the City Waddy Waddy Waddy Fun in the Sun Why Why Why

New Man

Turn back or run faster
Lighten burden
Break old world ties  
Become a being about whom
We do not have the vaguest notion   
Become a being about whom
We do not have the vaguest notion

Man of today Turning into a mass
Live like an object Preserving physical
Individuality
Man as an end in himself
Sordid aspects of Journalism
Lack of interest with
A sense of life

Man appallingly bored
World is buffeted by despair
Man appallingly bored
World is buffeted by
Love

Turn back or run faster
Lighten burden
Break old world ties
Become a being about whom
We do not have the vaguest notion (repeat)
Turn back or run faster

songlist



Problem Child

Well The black sheep
Of The entire world
With your eyes half-blind
All full of the problem child
That you found so hard to know

And the whole thing
Seems like its all gone insane
From one day to another day
Ticking that ol' time bomb away
Hoping that you can just blow up inside

Chorus:
And coulda problem child
Like me
Ever make it through
Coulda problem child
Like me
Ever find a problem child
Just like you

Well I'm tired
I'm tired of all that bad luck
All them angry little jabs
believing like I always had
My whole life on a string

Chorus

All the money in the world
Couldn't save a dead-end bum like me
I'm so glad
I could see
This light in you
Let it shine

Chorus

songlist



Famous Feelings

I don't need my name in lights
Or no picture in a magazine
Don't want to be anything on the outside
That ain't somehow
Part of what I call
My underneath

Chorus:
Cos I got them
Famous Feelings
Famous Feelings

Everything that I could ever want
Was everything that I never needed

I don't want to feel like a man
Who donÍt feel at all
Live your life in an empty lot
Just cos you're a face in the crowd
Don't mean you donÍt have a spot
In somebody's heart

Chorus

songlist



Flashing Blue

Kicked out of my old room again
My beer cans they wall-papered me in
Fired from work as a soda jerk
Nerves too shot and too half in the bag
Read my rights by a wino's gut
This blood-shot brain of this whiskey slave
Holding out his hands for the same ol' stuff

I want to throw-up
In this ol' detox again
They say own up there's no place
That you ain't already been
But my mouth is on fire
IÍm breaking out in sweat again
Shuffling in slippers
A pajama soul
Bumming cigarettes from a bathroom stall
Making us sit through those meetings again
The t.v.'s too loud and my skin's too thin
I want to shout I want to yell
My head is aching like the ring-a-ding-a-ling of a bell

I feel like I've been nailed to this bed
Everything I remember it's something else instead
Ah what's a new life
When all youÍve ever really been is half-dead
And IÍm seeing those police lights flashing in my head
Chased my whole life by this spinal dread
DonÍt have a lover don't even have a friend
DonÍt have a reason and I can't pretend
I think I'll regret I'll regret that I said
I'd never touch that booze again

But I have seen the light coming from behind you
I have seen the light and it's flashing blue

songlist



Sober Country

I closed myself down
When I got fed up
ItÍs sure not easy
But then things are always difficult
And riding through sober country
Gotta take a second look
With my eyes wide open
I can read it like a book
And see
The possibility (in)
Sober Country Sober Country
Sober Country Sober Country

I got my cigarettes
And my can of pop
CanÍt say that IÍm down
Or that I'm up
Just driving through Sober Country
Gotta take a second look
With my eyes wide open
I can read it like a book
And see
The possibility (in)
Sober Country Sober Country
Sober Country Sober Country

songlist



Day of the Dead

Woke up this morning
Are those skeletons outside?
Walk out amoungst them
Shades between the sun and my eyes
Parriah dogs under my feet
Fright mask on every other face
Dust twists ghosts in waves of heat
I can hear the volcano breathing
You can follow me down
For my first glass of tequila
On the day of the dead

I nurse her lost love
To the bottom of the glass
The white horse in the rain
Wears no mask
Crack of lightning, blurried grins
Bandits cackle, treetops spin
I drift down
Her name again
Redwash blackout fading in
You can follow me down
Into a ditch with a dog corpse waiting
On the day of the dead

songlist



Kiss and Tell

Kiss and Tell
All my secrets
Kiss and Tell
My whole life
The news travels
So quickly
To whatever bedroom
She's in tonight

And now
I want
To make
This clear
This intercom network
Started from hereDon't start thinking
She loves you so well
Kiss and Tell, Kiss and Tell

She steps in
From the darkness
He lies awake
In the bedroom alone
I'm sorry, I'm late
She whispers softly
Her voice rings
Just like the telephone

And now
I want
To make
This clear
This intercom network
Started from hereDon't start thinking
She loves you so well
Kiss and Tell, Kiss and Tell

Kiss and Tell
All my secrets
Kiss and Tell
My whole life
She says baby
Hold me tightly
She says baby
Won't you be mine

songlist



Lost in Love

It's like they say
It was the end of an era
But I would say that yesterday's
Been coming for a year
In this old town
You gotta grow up
So much
Faster than you're ready to
Same time next year
I won't be here
But I'll still be on my own
Have you ever been
Lost in love like me?

songlist


MOCKRACY


Class War

There's a song they teach in schools
About freedom and liberty
In this nation born out of Genocide and slavery
And politics sell people war
In the name of Democracy
While your tax dollar funds
World-wide atrocities

I heard a song about injustice
On a big stereo
That cost more than a year's worth
To a man in the ghetto

There's abandon and famine-blood
In our own backyard
And the camera's trained on a brand name
While the poverty's ignored
But ignorance is murder
In this systematic war
On the dignity of the voiceless
Expendable poor

I heard a man in a bar
Drinking hard after a work day
Say you have to be rich
To even think that way

History and Charity
Let winners off easily
Cos behind closed doors
They found out the key to the system
Our indifference is their best weapon

ARMS/ALMS FOR THE CLASS WAR

Capitalism
Holds on tight
And ladies of the night
Know and you should too
The customer's always right
Love and promise
Made to crawl like dog soldiers
The masters of war have signed sealed and sold her
Wage war with class wages where's it begin
And I called out your name
But I'd already turned you in

songlist



Final Hour

Some things never change
Some things you can watch get worse
she would have done anything
To fill her purse
Was it love she was after?
Or was it only power?
She never really knew
Until the final hour

Nero played the fiddle
Chamberline bought the big lie
Can you name the symptom
ThatÍs causing this old whore to die?
Was it love she was after
Or was it only power?
She never really knew
Until the final hour

songlist



Hold Out

Shoulda seen it coming
A long time ago
Before Auschwitz and Stalin
And Los Alamos
Avert your eyes
From the unpleasant
Like the blood in your veins
And we'll never be quite certain
Of our killerÍs name
I hold out
At the brink
To wait for
The missing link

songlist



Monkey Farm

The man down at the big school
Has solved the subject shortage
The final solution
In the slaughterhouse log
Will make the market
In a pretty package
Sadists in lab coats and lapels
Plot an intricate Hell
For a hapless menagerie
Mastermind the bewildered
Screech-symphony
Bile soaked wounds snuff wordless protest
Tests and pointless retests prove useless
Scorch/Sever/Blind/Drug and Trash
In the name of Cosmetics, War and Cash
Break the beast - build
Fantastic lies
We torture innocence - and mock
Our own lives
And now they want to build you
A monkey farm
And it's your dollar - not theirs
That will build
Your monkey farm

songlist



Silent Spring

Industrialization has its merits
I'm sure I'm a happier man because of it
I'm no holier than thou
Progress is our god today
There's precious little in the way
That's keeping us from doing today
What we shouldn't even do tomorrow

Chorus:
And it's going to be a silent spring this year
Mourning mute mornings
No birds left now by the Jersey shore
Poison pours
from chimneys built out of sight
But what you don't see
Cannot hurt you
But then again it might


Bleak white sun bleeds through thin air
And poison ponds froth forth no welcome
Too few birds passing there
Beauty lies in scattered light
On rusted seething jet-trash
The excrement of man-made plants
Chokes SWAN SONGS from the birds that pass

Chorus

Sophisticated schoolyards echo talk
Of Death and Beauty
Down sterile halls
Of asbestos walls
No one's appalled when the
Know-it-alls
Will tell you what the truth is
But there's a blind eye and a deaf ear
When it's anything more than an idea

The buds are late this year I'm told
But I see leaves already turning
Nature's churning gyre and gimbal
Gone astray
Orpheus and Sisyphus and Narcissus
Are brothers in tradition
Of centuries of a western mind
That still declines to listen

Chorus

songlist



Same ol' Stories

They met at the dancehall
Where they both got drunk
They didn't even have time
To fall in love
And the kidÍs on the way
And they feel kinda dumb
So they go ahead and get married
Orƒ
You grow up abused, badgered and scared
Of your old man's belt
And his contemptuous stares
But ya grew up and got your own wife
And your own kids too
And you treat them the way
Your old man treated you

Chorus:
Hey I'm sorry those same ol' stories
They wear thin after a while
So ya do what your Mama did
And ya do what your Daddy done
And ya make the same mistakes
Only twice as bad.

Sober as the judge
And twice as hypocritical
Your could run the world's affairs
Cos it was all political
But ya couldn't put a cork in that jug of gin
Behind the wheel
Ya did a whole family in.
Orƒ
Haunted by your mother's religious touch
You looked to the Virgin Mary
And Jesus Christ for love
But it's a taste of sin
You repress in your life
Your faith is fear Your hell is desire.

Chorus

Someday, Somebody's
Gonna understand
That these stories we make up
Perpetuate themselves in the end
Call it a vicious circle
Or a catch-22
But call it
Don't let it
Call you.

Chorus.

songlist

photoshoot

pictured above: Larry Fessenden, Tom Laverack, Noah Stein, Mark Ellison

lyrics by Laverack: Problem Child, Famous Feelings, Flashing Blue, Sober Country, Kiss and Tell, Hold Out, Same Ol' Stories

lyrics by Fessenden: New Man (after Montale), Lost in Love, Class War, Final Hour, Monkey Farm, Silent Spring

others written together

all songs © 1987 TGLTF music


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