Lyrics
House up in Clearlake[4]
Where I used to live
Picked the lock on the front door
And felt it give
Touch nothing, move nothing, stand still
Keep my ears open for cars
See how the people here live now
Hope that they're better at it than I was
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
Pictures up on the mantle
Nobody I know
I stand by the tiny furnace
Where the long shadows grow
Living room to bedroom to kitchen
Familiar and warm
Hours we spent starving within these walls
Sounds of a distant storm
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
Fight through the ghosts in the hallway
Duck and weave
Stand by the door with my eyes closed
When it's time to leave
Steal home before sunset
Cover up my tracks
Drive home with old dreams of play in my mind
And the wind at my back
Break the lock on my own garden gate
When I get home after dark
Sit looking up at the stars outside
Like teeth in the mouth of a shark
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
I used to live here
Banter
- This is gonna take a minute. There's probably a fair number of you, not knowing much about demographics but just guessing, whose parents were divorced at some point in their childhood. [Audience cheers] Yeah, man. You know, they did what they had to do. And so when that happens, you move, generally speaking. A few times, it sort of fragments things, and if you are five, as I was when my parents divorced, your memory of your childhood becomes this Edenic thing. Not only Edenic, but very large. My father built a house, or - built a room onto that house when I was like, four, and it was called the front room, and it was this big cathedral ceiling, amazing place. It had a piano in it and a record collection, and I would flip through the records and think so hard about music and, so, I was in SLO a few weeks ago on tour. Last tour I drove past the house. This time I went walking, and walked up - haven't been inside this house since I was 8, I walked up to the door and there was a poster of Snoop and Tupac on it. And said, 'Wow, do I still live here, did something happen?' So I stood there for a brief moment and I knocked, and the college students who were renting it let me in, and it was the tiniest house I had ever set foot in. It used to be a huge auditorium and now it was like. I do this everywhere I've ever lived. (2009-12-01 Webster Hall)
Live Performances
Footnotes
1. Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (KJV) ↩
2. The demo for Genesis 3:23 was released on The Life of the World in Flux. (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
3. John describes this song as being about visiting places where one has lived and had intense, disastrous experiences, and specifically about breaking and entering houses where one formerly lived.. Listen for example to the banter at the Durham Be Easy Festival, August 14, 2009, Durham Armory, North Carolina. This is further described in the Breihan 2009 Pitchfork interview... in which John describes feeling the need to go through his old places in Portland and Claremont as a way of coping with abuse. The interviewer notes that while John is wanting to revisit abusive or destructive households, the verse describes being cast out of Eden. In response, John says: "Well, everything's Edenic. Everything is. I really don't know what your past is like, but I've got to assume, like everyone else, you have plenty of pain in it, right? But when you go back to the places where the pain was at, you find that there was more stuff there, and that there's stuff about it that you miss just because it's you. Because that's who you were, and you grow to accept that. When you do that kind of stuff, whether it's Eden or not, it is. Every place that you left is Eden in some way." (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩
4. Clear Lake is the name of many towns, but given John's reference to Portland it perhaps refers to a unincorporated town near Salem, Oregon (map). However, John refers to his house being near North Broadway (Breihan 2009), placing it well within Portland city limits. Perhaps more likely is that the town is an homage to Clear Lake, Iowa, which is only an hour or so north of Ames, where John lived while writing the Coroner's Gambit. Thanks to Dan Coffey (of Ames himself!) for pointing this out! The house in this story may thus be fictional or from another part of his life, and could be from one of several states, including California and Iowa, both states where John has resided. (Credit: Annotated TMG)↩