Brisbane Hotel Sutra
Lyrics
On the crooked road that took me north
And brought me home again
From the pit of writhing serpents
Out to the lion's den
Where the labyrinth is lightless
And the faithless wander crazed
Let the light rise from the darkness
Let his name be praised
From the sunrise of my childhood
To its premature demise
From my mother's best intentions
To my stepdad's seething eyes
From the hidden self-inflicted wounds
That flowered in later days
To the folly of their learning
Let his name be praised
In the holes the worms have eaten
Through all once-treasured things
From the wet mouth of the vulture
To the red tips of his wings
In the dazed eyes of the penitent
Emerging from the maze
In his wordless explanations
Let his name be praised
Banter
- This song almost didn't get played live at all, but-but diligence and a patient audience have rewarded us with uh, a complete [unintelligible] I should play, frankly. I wrote this in a, uh-I get depressed on tour, um, and it's really a very strange feeling if you let the depression hit you, you know, and you're in Brisbane, Australia, you're on the other side of the world. The-The extent of your good fortune and privilege can't even be measured. Y-you are gonna play songs for people who tell you that they like them and have use for them and your life has meaning and value, and yet you feel extraordinarily depressed. This is because depression has nothing to do with whether your life is going well or not, right? So, uh, but, uh-but so I'll be sitting there in the room, and I won't have been paying attention to my mood all day, and then suddenly the floor goes out from under me, and I have learned over the past five years or so that uh, for me, if I just start working then, um, something good might come out. Um, uh, this was uh- so this was written in uh, uh, the Medina Hotel in uh, Brisbane, Australia, and it's called 'Brisbane Hotel Sutra.' (2014-02-28)
- This is an outtake from All Eternals Deck that I think wound up on the Australian issue — there's a long, boring story about why foreign presses get bonus tracks, it's really not very interesting. Though I always feel this urge to explain it, on account of I'm insufferable. But, this was a song that — it's one of those that we got really attached to, and then it just doesn't fit in with the others, 'cause we dwell really hard on sequence, we want — and we know that we're the only ones who care, right, but we still want the songs to be a sequence that if you sit and listen to it in that order that it does something, that it coheres as a picture somehow. And if there's a song that won't play with the others, then no matter how much we like it, it has to go. And this was that one that I wrote — I mean, it's essentially — from time to time songs will crop up for me that belong on The Sunset Tree, right, but not to say they're as good as those or whatever, but they're in the same vein, right, they're from that impulse that will never be fully settled, right. But, then I don't know where to put them, 'cause they don't fit, so they wind up as bonus tracks or just live stuff, and this was one that I was sitting in a hotel room in Brisbane, Australia, having a wonderful life, being far away from home and playing music for strangers in a beautiful country and having a great time, and a mood descended on me, and I wrote a lyric, and I looked at it, and I said, 'Well, I don't know what to do with that', set it aside for a year or two, and then while we were in the studio in Kernersville in North Carolina, we tried it. It's called Brisbane Hotel Sutra. (2014-04-19)