Alpha Rat's Nest
Lyrics
Ah the lengthening hours and the refinery
Belching fire into the sky
We do our best vampire routines
As we suck the dying hours dry
The night is lovely as a rose
If I see sunlight hit you
I am sure that we'll both decompose
Ah the fitful sleep and the fire engines
That I dream of when I dream
Some day we'll both wake up for good
I will try hard not to scream
The evening wind will shake the blinds
You're stirring from your slumber
We've got something hateful on our minds
Oh sing sing sing
For the dying of the day
Sing for the flames that will rip through here
And the smoke that will carry us away
Yeah sing for the damage we've done
And the worse things that we'll do[1]
Open your mouth up and sing for me now
And I will sing for you
Banter
- Most albums that I write, I don't know what the order of the songs is gonna be while I'm writing...usually once you go into the studio to record these studio records, the shape of it starts to suggest itself. But I always knew that this was gonna be the last song on Tallahassee. (2007-06-17)
- Audience: Color in My Cheeks!!
JD: I'm not gonna play that song right now, but I will love you forever for calling it Color in My Cheeks. [awws, Peter laughing] That just made me so fucking happy, you'll never know. 'Cause I do that with my own songs all the time. I'll just change a little, change a pronoun there and be really happy about it. This is like, two alpha songs in a row, and I was very excited to see this on a setlist. And surprised, because I surprise myself by forgetting things. (2013-06-05 - Maxwell's, Hoboken)
- I have to say this is my favorite of all the alpha song titles, and I don't know why. Well, I do know why. I was thinking about this earlier. Not about this song, but I was thinking about why is Guns N Roses scarier than all the other bands of that era. [laughter] Motley Crüe would like to have been so scary. They had Shout at the Devil, with a pentagram on it, but they're not as scary as Guns N Roses. That's because Guns N Roses had the foresight to misspell things. This is not - there's not much scarier than dumb people. [cheering] This is the thing. I don't think Axl Rose is a dumb person. I think Axl Rose knows that there's nothing scarier than dumb people. So his whole business plan setting out like, imma convince people, I'm gonna cut the dumbest figure I can cut. And when people see me, they'll go, man, that guy's dumb, he's liable to hurt somebody! Because it's like, how are you gonna know what he's doing? Smart people, you can reason with them. Dumb people, they're just going to hurt you. They don't know any better. But before you've had a chance to try and get out of their way, they've already destroyed a thing or two, and they'll break a few more on their way out. They can't see in front of their faces, because they're dumb, and when you see a missing punctuation mark or something, you go, ah, I better be careful, I'm in the presence of dumb people. So I was very proud because the thing is, you know, once - this is a fucking long story. So once, and I hope I'm not badmouthing people who still [inaudible], but this is the thing, I suspect they're both dead now. But a couple people come up to us, very early on, like, within a year of Tallahassee or something, in South Carolina, and like, this is a place, it's a club that didn't have a dressing room, so I'm hanging out at the bar playing a video poker game, take two, you know, it really hurts your hands after a couple hours. I kick ass at it. I'll beat you so bad. I will take your money. So. There is no money involved in the game. So I'm sitting there playing take two, there's no dressing room, waiting to play, and these people come up and go, 'Hey!!! Are you John? We're the alpha couple!!!' and I say, whooooa. Like, some people romanticize those people but those people are dumb and angry, that's their whole deal! It's like, sometimes we are all dumb angry people, so we relate to them when we meet them on that little axis of 'I hope to God I never live next door to them', but I'm them at this moment, so I can dig where they're coming from. But then you meet people who, their relationship to the Tallahassee album is, yeah, I relate to them, this is a record about my life. This is those people. I'm gonna play a song for them, it's called - it has no apostrophe - it's called Alpha Rats Nest. (2013-06-15 - Buskirk-Chumley Theatre, Bloomington)
- This song is about a divorce, uh, it's about a couple of people who have decided, you know, and I suspect that this approach in real life wouldn't really work but that's why it's a song and not a practice. They decided to make a great conflagration of the end of their relationship instead of sort of a little bad feeling that they go away into their own separate corners to share, to do it together, to tear everything down, brick by brick and stone by stone until there's nothing left and then presumably, uh, to perish in the flames with one another. We don't really know. This is the last we see of them; it's called 'Alpha Rats Nest'. (2015-09-12)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. "the worse things we'll both do" (2013-06-12)