He Knew All The Words

The new Okkervil River album, I Am Very Far, is killer. All the songs are great — but get a load of this one: Lay of the Last Survivor. It’s a stunner, with Will Sheff’s typically poetic lyrics stretching over one of the most elastic melodies you’ll ever hear (one stanza near the beginning has 17 syllables; later in the song another stanza sung to the same melody has 25 syllables) — and all of it filled with internal rhymes, assonance, and more than its fair share of beauty.

Lyrics posted below to read along:

Lay of the Last Survivor

She went out and found
her father face down on the ground
out in the cold.

Walked her way around
a hill with the sun sinking down
into the snow.

All the whitecaps of the waves slap
like last handclaps,
and the dark water dies in a crash,
is sucked back with a moan,
smoke on the coast —
oh, piled fathers,
soft, sighing daughters,
where does it go?

It’s a dream, now, I’ll describe:
let your mind drift on down,
like so,

to when the world was young–
A big sky, blue of a dead bachelor’s tongue.
A bloom on the rose.

So some line someone told
says even light can get old.
Oh, slobbering lovers,
drink-clinking brothers,
they don’t have to tell us, because we know.

What a way down.
What a ride.
What a slide spin-around.
What a life to have known.

What a time, and how I was singing out
in a crowd of the thousand
most frightening faces I’ve known

and when the lighthouse
lending us sight finally went out,
what a fright we felt
in that night, friends.
Let’s just shout it out,
all the whys and don’t knows,
all the cries in our throats,
and how right we felt,
with our eyes tightly closed,
holding something we broke–

and then, whimpering sisters,
sobbing well wishers,
well it’s over. Just let my hand go.

Buy it here.

Moving piano version of one of Gabriel’s best songs.