Birth of Serpents^[1][2]

Lyrics

Let the camera pull back till the fullness
of the frame is clear and plain
Peer into the screen until you see it all
like a vision in a crystal ball
Let it all fill with smoke
Is this somebody's idea of a joke

Let the fixer work^[3] until the silver's
washed away and take the
picture from the tray
Look hard at what you see and then
remember you and me
and let the truth spring free

Like a jack-in-the-box
Like a hundred-thousand cuckoo clocks
From the Oregon corners
To the Iowa corn
To the rooms with the heat lamps
where the snakes get born

Crawl through the tunnel and follow,
follow the light northwest
See that young man who dwells inside
his body like an uninvited guest
See the tunnel twist
Clutch your birthright in your fist
Let the camera do its dirty work
down there in the dark
Sink low, rise high,
and bring back some blurry pictures to
remember all your darker moments by

Permanent bruises on our knees
Never forget what it felt like
to live in rooms like these
From the California coastline
To the Iowa corn
To the rooms with the heat lamps
where the snakes get born

Banter

• OK, so I'm in Portland, Oregon, which is a very strange place for me to go, right, I had what I, I mean, I assume everybody in the world has a dark year, at least one, you know, where you go, 'Wow, it's very hard to, like, the things that are redeeming about those years become triply precious because they were so redeeming compared to the other stuff going down.' And Portland was like that for me. It was a lot of rain, a lot of darkness, a lot of hard times, but at the same time there were like moments of tremendous sweetness that I managed to pull up from all that. But every time I go back there it just feels like this haunted landscape, you know, it's like, 'Oh my God, there's one corner where I did something I hope never to remember, but I do', right. And it's like every fucking corner is like that for me. And, you know, from 6th and Yamhill all the way on out to 13th and Taylor is some hard times, and I went on this long walk, and I have to cut a very long story short, I got a haircut, asked the hairdresser if he knew a guy I used to know, and he did, he said that yes, Quinn still works at Escape from New York Pizza in northwest. 'Really, like seven blocks from here, right?' 'Yeah, yeah, you can walk there!' 'OK, well, cool.' And I walked down to Escape from New York and I walked in, 'Can I help you?' I said, 'Well, I'm not really hungry, can I get, like, a lemonade', and I say in my heart, like, Quinn's there, I'm gonna say hi to Quinn, my friend from the 80s, a wildfire drag queen champion of the city. And a sweet, sweet, person. And I say, "Yeah, is Quinn working tonight?" and the guy looked at me like I had stepped out of a spacecraft, and said, 'Quinn?' 'Yeah, yeah, Quinn Richards.' And he said 'No, no, Quinn died just last year. He made it through the AIDS epidemic but he got hit by a car in front of the Plaid Pantry." And I walked home with a — in a really strange mindset. And I had this title sitting around for a long time, I slept for two hours and I woke up and I wrote the lyric and put it to bed for three months, and when I woke it back up this is the song that came out. (2011-04-08)
• This is a song about a young fellow who goes up to Portland, Oregon and gets really into speed. He looks shockingly like me. (2011-06-23)
• This is a song about being young and stupid and somehow managing to survive it. (2011-08-05)
• I wrote this song when I went to Portland, Oregon at the end of 2008. For me, going to Portland is sort of like- if you ever… Do you remember this old video game where you used to try and shoot ghosts? It was a very, very, very simple video game that you will still see if you go to, like, some town that nobody else goes to. You stop there for gas and they have one bar and the bar has a video game in it that was built in 1981 and it's running on the same chip and then the images, the two-dimensional images have burned themselves into the screen. So, no matter where you move your character, there's still this one that's just burning there at the centre because it sat there unplayed for so long, right. And the game is called like Ghost Hunt or something like that, you know. And the idea is to shoot ghosts, which, I don't think I need to tell you, is a completely ridiculous idea because you can't- they're ghosts. There's really nothing you can say to a ghost about a gun or a knife or anything that they can feel. 'I've been dead, possibly for a very long time. So shooting at me is a terrible idea.' But the ghosts in the machine can't talk. You just shoot them and I guess they pretend to be dead for the sake of, you know, everybody feeling good. Anyway, I went to Portland. There's a lot of ghosts in Portland for me. I don't try to shoot them; I try to make my peace with them. That's maybe even dumber than trying to shoot them. And yet, I do it every time I go there. I woke up about an hour or two after sleep and found a title sitting in a notebook and I said, 'That's for me at this moment.' (2012-05-06)
• This is about going back to the storefronts and various places where you used to self-mutilate and looking at them and going, 'You don't actually own me anymore. I don't have to come see you anymore if I don't want to.' (2017-11-10)

Live Performances

• 2023-07-13 The Vanguard

Footnotes