STORY

I wrote this song while imagining what it must be like for the ghosts of our ancestors to rise from their graves & collide with the noise of our modern world: all the radio waves & cell phone tower transmissions, the light pollution from our cities. I imagined their ghostly bodies ending up tangled & broken amongst our electrical towers & telephone wires.

A lot of people worry about extinctions: the loss of coral reefs, the disappearance of tigers, rhinos, rare plants, rare birds. I do, too. But I also worry about the loss of cultures & languages around the world, every one of which represents a uniquely human perspective. When the last member of a tribe dies, or when a language is finally forgotten, that unique perspective on what it is to be a human, & to live on Earth, is lost to us all.

To bring the song to life, I asked the band to add some ancient instruments to the mix: didgeridoo, hurdy-gurdy, bouzouki. But I put the sound of each of them through guitar amplifiers & effects pedals, distorting & manipulating them - just like those ancient ghosts that get tangled in our modern wires. If you listen carefully, you can hear Rafe Pearlman singing in an Ashkenazic Jewish style, high up above the buzzing of the didgeridoo and hurdy-gurdy. And somewhere in there is Melissa Ruby singing into the sound hole of a bouzouki (another medieval European instrument), which we then put through the same guitar effects chain that Tony Iommi used to record his guitar on Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”. Nuts? You bet. Super-fun, too.

 LYRICS

Spirit like a spirit like a memory walking
Flicker like a flicker like a signal broken
Cut you from the cut you from the earth that binds you
Strung like a martyr on the web and wire

Static on the line on the line on the line
Stirrin? in the stirrin? in the stirrin? in the halflight
Blind the dismalled eyes that hold too much
Do not belong and do not touch

For this ghost is gone again
but memory still remains
Sleeping deep beneath the soil
in humid coil
We are falling open
This ghost is broken

The hum of the grid of the grid of the grid
Drowning out the words of the indignant dead
Radio radio amnesia
Smell of ozone transmission lost

So this ghost is gone again
Brittle wings of memoried things
Drowse and heave of hive and drone
The sigh of un-alone
We are falling open
This ghost is broken

The numberlight the chemic glow the pilgrim red
Don't you call it murder they're already dead
How did it go? What were the last words they said?
Something about the poison of a mother's milk

We are falling open
This ghost is broken