I’ve been having a difficult time looking inward in writing lyrics lately. It takes me months to write anything I think is worth showing anyone (which is part of the reason we release one EP every year), but it seems that when words finally start to flow there’s nothing I can do to stop them. Recently, these words have been observational.

One of my closest friends and my current room-mate inspired me to write. He told me a story about a pilgrimage he made to his Father’s grave. His Dad died when he was six years old. Eighteen years later, to the day, he decided to visit the house he grew up in and to “have a beer with his Father.” He told me it was “one of the greatest things [he] had ever done in [his] entire life.” The entire story was so intense and poetic that I immediately began writing and wrote the song below. Not that I have delusions of grandeur or anything, but please don’t steal any of it. Read, comment, and repost but leave it so that we can put it on the full length we are working on. Above all else, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.


Black Irish

Three sheets and a line drawn in between a broken home and a family tree
Six years old he waits underneath to feel the breeze

But should he have to ask,
“If I have his name do I have his laugh?
Was he Black Irish?”
Would he have to ask,
“Should I be ashamed if I forget?”

He walked the two miles from the stop, straight to Queens from the Myrtle-Wyckoff
Pale blonde head frothing overwrought with thoughts like

Should he have to ask,
“If I have his name do I have his laugh?
Was he Black Irish?
And if I drink myself to death
with my Father’s flask am I just as bad
as a good man?”

Plain white envelopes held the promise of forever ago.
Our parents’ names don’t come here anymore,
but there’s a ditch between elbow and wrist where I always know
a banner will hold two Irish names and won’t let go.