Transcendental Youth

Lyrics

Cold through broken baseboards
I despise this town
Snow on the sunroof
Two stories down
Hold hands
Wish the snow away
Rise in the darkness
Of the gathering day

Sing
Sing for ourselves alone
Speak into
The microphone

Cedar smudge our headbands
And take to the skies
Soar ever-upwards
On air gone black with flies
Shroud ourselves in the cosmos
Let the music play
Bright star of the morning
Shine on his rising way

Sing
In the night
In the nameless dark
Father long gone
But we bear his mark

Learn some secrets
Never tell
Stay sick
Don't get well

Clutch those broken headboards
Ride the highest wave
Dusky diamonds shining in the far depths of the cave
Try to explain ourselves
Babble on and on
By the time you receive this, we'll be gone

Sing
Sing high
While the fire climbs
Sing one for the old times

Banter

• This is a song about, um, it's about how you miraculously — because you have a certain measure of contempt for your own body and you have never really felt comfortable in your own skin — but you miraculously go through a season when it seems like your body is your best friend, and you hole up in your room and, uh, decline to emerge from it, with the person you’ve chosen to hole up with. (2012-10-23)
• This song is about your sexuality. It's about how, if you find yourself alone, and desperate, and frightened, and literally yearning for death all of the time, but you find someone to sleep with, that [audience laughter] — I know, see, so people laugh, but those hours that you can spend in a place where your body feels like an okay thing to you and not your enemy, are the greatest hours that we're ever going to get. (2012-12-13)
• It's about the sort of, um, there's just no good way of saying it that isn't already saddled with too much cultural baggage to get across what I'm trying to say. It's about the healing sacred power of your sexuality, but you hear that and y'all live in San Francisco and you go, 'Yeah, but I don't hang out with those kind of people.' But the thing is, when you say that, when you go, 'Well, healing sacred power of sexuality, that's like tantric people right?' No, I don't mean that. I mean your everyday, whatever your deal is, like being able to be at home in your own body with another person present is a potentially extraordinarily powerful space. Especially if you have survived something horrible, right. That you can feel okay with somebody. Then this is like the greatest gift in the universe, like literally speaking. It's the best thing. It's a hard thing to talk about because, I don't know if you know this, but Americans are really fucked up about their sexuality. But, big secret: we like to say that so is everybody else. That's where the healing-power-of-sacred-sexuality people get it; they go, 'Well the ancient so-and-so's...' They were fucked up too. Guarantee you. They were all fucked up, except maybe teenagers. This song is for teenagers. (2012-12-14)
• I struggle to describe what this song is about because it's about, uh, human sexuality, which sounds really dry, right. So, but at the same time - it's about - so if you live in the Pacific Northwest, and, and maybe if you've been nineteen and extraordinarily lonely in a, in a January or February here, and it's fuckin' gray, and even if you grew up here, even if you spent lots of summers here, still the Januaries and Februaries are going to be extraordinarily rough, right, and so - It's, it's kind of rougher than where it snows and is icy for real, because, like, in the Midwest, it gets really cold, it's so fuckin' metal, right -- yeah, man, it's like twenty fuckin' below and no one can move, you know. But here, it just sort of is like it's this thing, this thing descends on you, right, and then it rests with you for several months. A lot of people try to pretend it's not a big deal. It's actually a big deal. And, and but maybe you find somebody to be with in a room and not leave for days on end. And it's a really special, amazing thing especially if you're kind of sick in your mind and you can't seem to get better and you can't relate to people very well. This is called 'Transcendental Youth.' (2012-12-17)

Live Performances

Footnotes