Outer Scorpion Squadron^[1]

Lyrics

If you really want to conjure up a ghost
Cultivate a space
for the things that hurt you most

Rake the sands until they surface
Blind their tiny eyes

Stake out your position,
let your armor fall
Stay put till they find you,
it won't take long at all

Rake the sands until they surface
Up they come, gone translucent

They're coming up no matter what
Fools rush in^[2] and the doors slam shut

Ghosts of my childhood
stay with me,if you will
Find a place where there's water,
hold you under til you're still

Rake the sands until they surface
Don't let anybody call them ugly

Banter

• I took a real sadistic glee in answering their questions honestly. 'So the new album is about life at home with your stepfather, tell me about that.' Well, once I saw him beat my mother with a vacuum cleaner. And you see what happens? Nobody says shit. Hahah. It's just so terrifying haha. Whereas if you lived in that house, after a certain point of removal, there's some humor in even the worst thing that happens. It is how you learn to cope with those situations. You learn to find it all funny at some level. And to take that terrible brutal glee in seeing how long people are willing to listen to you talk about it before they say 'Well you're just doing this to see how I react'. (2011-03-28)
• This is the thing -- I never know what to say if I have a song that, like, I mean, I hope you cry when you hear it, but, but I don't want you to cry during the intro or to feel bad or like you're doing something voyeuristic. Not, not that we live in an age where anyone cares whether they're being voyeuristic or not, but one presumes a level of human decency and thinks, 'you don't want to watch a guy standing up there, you know, telling you what a song is about if it's about something ugly and horrible, right.' You want to hear the ugly horrible song, right, because who doesn't want to hear the ugly horrible song. (2011-03-28)
• Hold up; I'm trying to think of how to formulate what I want to say in a way that doesn't bum everyone out again. I'm starting to get good at that, I feel. This is a song… by myself… for people like me… who - oh this sentence is really starting to take a nice shape - for people like me who have a strong, indwelling, evidently permanent, urge to damage themselves or cut themselves off, prior to some accomplishment or arrival at a place of comfort and happiness. I didn't succeed in my goal of not bumming everybody out. In short, it is a song about, uh, trauma and surviving it. (2011-03-29)
• Ah, man... the problem with Outer Scorpion Squadron is like, I wrote it and then Yuval Semo transcribed it for me, so when we toured that tour he played piano and I sang it, and now I have no recollection of what my chords were. It's a complex tune that I was very proud to have written and very happy to hand off to a better piano player than me. Me and Matt actually started working it up but I don't think we can actually do it. Next time. (2019-11-17)

Live Performances

Footnotes