I wrote this song on April 28, 2006, between 10:11pm and 11:30pm EST. David and I were in the middle of recording our HOPE (A Sliver, Like the Moon) EP, and he had gone out for the night. I stayed home and found myself writing a new song.

The music was simple but evocative to me (I played in an alternate tuning [DADAAD] and a little-used time signature [5/4]) and the lyrics flowed very quickly. The basic idea behind the song was a metaphor: my seemingly far-away and impossible hopes were like a cold but bright sliver of a rising moon, beautiful but distant.

The song explores the emotions that result from that situation... wondering whether I'm on the right track in life, feeling like radical things are supposed to be happening but aren't, etc...

Ultimately, this became one of my favorite songs! Fortuitously, we were able to squeeze it into our recording sessions, and so it won its place on the EP.

LYRICS:
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Rising, a sliver, like the moon
Take me right away to doom
Hope shouldn't be the end of me
Yet whispers say I'm 23
Rugged, the way to sanity
A lonely, sad old colony
Overlooked by all who've gone before,
Easier to sail to other shores

More to the point is I don't know
Which way it is that I should go
Newness, a sharp-lit symmetry
Attractive; does reality
Speak up, gently colorize
Halting the heart's unconscious rise
Freezing the blood that wants to stir?
Hibernation is a lonely word

So wake me up, wake me up

Can't stop the fires
that are running
Through trenches
towards me

Oh no

Ooooooooo

If flame is the order of the day
Responsibility for fuel is laid
With you so don't waste our time
I can only sing so many rhymes
Love's only if I close my eyes
Still I can't help but look to the prize
Watchman's vigil in a tower room
Spiteful of the brazen rising moon

So how long, how long

Can't stop the fires
that are running
Through trenches
towards me

Oh no

Ooooooooo