Song For A River Lyrics

Song For A River lyrics

He was the king of the back seat

 Of drunk reverie

 Saw him escorted out of a mets game

 On network t.v.

 Kept his head in the clouds

 With any cheap high he could cull

 In his cancered impala

 And his hog shirts

 And his head tapes played dull

 

 He lived in a company house

 In the pardeesville woods

 With a stir crazy dog

 And a graveyard of old "jimmy" hoods

 Sundays we'd run for his stash

 At the new york state line

 That summer when moments of

 Circumstance altered like wine

 

 (chorus)

 This is for the man

 This is for the days that we killed

 Was it my wind of change

 Or just a breeze at the top of the hill

 He didn't talk the gold ring

 He just schemed for a skeleton key

 But when you think you met thunder

 You only see what your head wants to see

 

 He threw back-mountain parties

 Five deep at the "well"

 With his girlfriend, louise, who'd get lit

 And tell us all "go to hell"

 Then he'd get liquored up

 And throw me the keys and yell "drive"

 With him and louise in the back

 Doin' "american pie"

 

 He'd talk of out west over beer

 And the garbage that we ate

 'bout the punk band he'd managed

 In phoenix in '78

 I was this kid of sixteen the enamored

 Impressionable kind

 In the poetic pull of the passion

 Of life with the lines

 

 (chorus)

 

 He just disappeared that mid-august

 Not even a shout

 Then i read in the news that september

 That his time had run out

 How he tried to outrun a state trooper

 Down 93 south

 A charge of possession is why he fled

 Said word of mouth

 

 The paper said nothin' was left

 But the seats and the frame

 And i read in the write-up

 For the first time his real name;

 Birthplace unknown, not from nowhere

 No close family

 Just a wild river running

 That cut it too fast to the sea

 

 I still raise a glass once a year

 On the night that he died

 Though hindsight says

 He only let me believe that we'd ride

 Lord, he still taps a vein in my mind

 Like a summer rain cools

 Long after that river ran dry

 And reality ruled

 

 (chorus2x)