Ani DiFranco Album

So that's how you found me
Rain falling around me
Lookin down at a worm
With a long way to go
And the traffic was hissing by
And i was homesick
And i was high

I was surrounded by a language
In which i could say only hello
And thank you very much
But you spoke so i could understand
And i drew a treasure map on your hand

And you were no picnic
You were no prize
But you had just enough pathos
To keep me hypnotized
Hypnotized

The map led to an island
In a sea of store-bought dreams
Where soulless singers sang
Over beats built by machines

And lovely girls were hovering
Above my head like gulls
With their long slender necks
And their delicate skulls

And i was no picnic
I was no prize
But i had just enough sweetness
To keep you hypnotized
Hypnotized

So that's how you found me
Rain falling around me
Lookin down at a worm
With a long way to go

On one hand I’m walking
the way that I do
looking like I’m lost in thought
but I’m looking for you

it’s so subconscious
the way that I feel
too bad my subconscious life
is the more real

and I ain’t in the best shape
that I’ve ever been in
but I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been
I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been

some kind of anxiety
has gotten hold of my heart
and I just want to run home
when I feel it start

plastic bottles of water
sealed windows, forced air
and gazillions of cell phones
beaming through my (h)air

and I ain’t in the best shape
that I’ve ever been in
but I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been
I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been

I’m tossing and turning
between sleepless dreams
and I’m poised on the edge of
what it all means

so I turn my back
and I spread my arms wide
and I let myself fall in
way deep inside

and I ain’t in the best shape
that I’ve ever been in
but I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been
I know where I’m going
and it ain’t where I’ve been

Such an intent stare
One eye at a time
Your talons like fish hooks

You are a rare bird
The kind I wouldn't even mind
Writing in the margins of my books

Sometimes I see myself
Through the eyes of a stray dog
From an alley across the street
And my whole mission just seems so finite
My whole saga just seems so cheap

I mean I know that now is all there is
And love'll just makes you cry
So I live for the sight of a rare bird
Suddenly flying by

And I meet your stare
One eye at a time
Writing in the margins
Of my mind

Sometimes I see myself
Through the eyes of a stray dog
From an alley across the street
And my whole mission just seems so fine
My whole saga just seems so cheap

And that's when your song calls to me
From way up in a tree
And I look up
And the whole world
Is as it should be

I hate you sometimes
But I love to be your queen
You are my muse
Got me smoking nicotine

I watch you sometimes
From oh so far away
But I can't forget you
Or anything you said

You sang that song in my ear
And it tickled those tiny hairs

Love is a puzzle
Some pieces they adjoin
It's not like that with us
But I keep flipping that coin

I watch you sometimes
From oh so far away
But I can't forget you
Or anything you say

You sang that song in my ear
And it tickled those tiny hairs

Step up and forfeit your frontal lobe
To the sexed up stroll of celebrity
Never mind that the nanoseconds in between
Are some of the darkest darkness that you've ever seen
Keep your eye on my finger
And listen to the sound of my voice

Get your subliminal decree
And your false security
Be all that you can be
Be all that you can be

In hospitals and schools
Airports and banks and bars
Big ones on street corners
Little ones driving by in cars
And glowing through countless
Bedroom curtains at night
That 30k tone
And that pale blue light saying

Daddy knows best
Yes, this is the news
In 90 second segments officially produced
And aired again and again and again
By the little black and white pawns
Of the network yes men
While the stars are going out
And the stripes are getting bent

And cancer, the great teacher
Has been opening schools
Downstream from every factory
Still, everywhere fools are
Squinting into microscopes
Researching cells
Trying to figure out a way
That we can all live in hell

Well, step back, look up
You'll see I'm dimming the sun
But you won't, will you?
Oh, that's a good little one

'cause daddy knows best
Yes, this is the news
In 90 second segments officially produced
And aired again and again and again
By the little black and white pawns
Of the network yes men
While the stars are going out
And the stripes are getting bent

The stars are going out
And the stripes are getting bent

When the joy had left your body
And you were locked into your own pulse
You used to love to sit by the water
And watch it lapping on the rocks
And every time you put your feet in
You cry out and you pray
But its all downhill from here, baby
So naturally, I can't stay

First you roll your eyes to heaven
Say you've never had love so divine
But it will go from more than ever
To not enough in no time

You will push and
You will push until
You push me away
I hear you cry out for your water
I know you'll curse it someday

I guess for me there's been few
Who've walked up smiling and drawn a line
Between so far and from now on
Yes a big glowing life time

And I've been disappointed
I've been heart-broken
I too have loved from afar
But we are 78% water
Even our pumping hearts

Millennium theater
Get out there and buy that water and gas
Ramadan orange alert
Everybody put on your gas mask

First leak it out about the president
Then stand up and shout "impeachment"
Pulling coat tails out from under that little V.P.
Before he has a chance to get in the driver's seat

Millennium spectacle
Everybody put on a show
Slip a little prince in the back door
21st century here we go

Digital whiplash
So many formats so little time
While out in TV nation
Under darkening skies
The resistance is just waiting
To be organized

Millennium theater
Chief justice is for sale
Yucca mountain goddesses
Their tears they form a trail

Trickle down Israel
Patriarchies realign
The ice caps melt
And New Orleans bides her time
New Orleans bides her time

Ladies and gentlemen
Welcome to tonight's show
The millennium theater
Asks that you not smoke
Please turn off your cell phones
And forget what you think you know

You start trippin
And i start slippin away
I was taught to zip it
If i got nothin nice to say
And down in the texas of my heart
Driving a really big truck
Headed down a dirt road
My love is scrunchin up its features
The really big eyes
Big lips, big nose

Just show me a moment that is mine
Its beauty blinding and unsurpassed
Make me forget every moment that went by
And left me so half-hearted
Cuz i felt it so half-assed

You are an unruly translucent
A dirty windshield with a shifting view
So many cunning running landscapes
For my dented door to open into
I just wanna tune out all the billboards
Weld myself a mental shield
I just wanna put down all the pressures
And feel how i really feel

Just show me a moment that is mine
Its beauty blinding and unsurpassed
Make me forget every moment that went by
And left me so half-hearted
Cuz i felt it so half-assed

Spring is super in the supermarkets
And the strawberries prance and glow
Nevermind that they're all kinda tart and tasteless
As strawberries go
Meanwhile wild things are not for sale
Anymore than they are for show
So i'll be outside, in love with the kind of beauty
It takes more than eyes to know

Just show me a moment that is mine
Its beauty blinding and unsurpassed
And i'll forget every moment that went by
And left me so half-hearted
Cuz i felt it so half-assed

Manhattan is an island
Like the women who are
Surrounded by children in the car
Surrounded by cars

Or manhattan was a project
That projected the worst of mankind
First one and then the other
Has made its mark on my mind

It's sixty years later near the hypo-center of the a-bomb
I'm standing in the middle of hiroshima
Watching a twisted old eucalyptus tree wave
One of the very few lives that survived and lives on
Remembering the day it was suddenly thousands of degrees
In the shade

And what all of nature gave birth to
Terror took in a blinding raid
With the kind of pain
It would take cancer so many years just to say

Oh to grow up gagged and blindfolded
A great big mans world in your little girls head
The voice of the great mother drowned out
In the constant honking haunting the accident scene up ahead
Oh to grow up hypnotized and then try to shake yourself awake
Cause you can sense what has been lost
Cause you can sense what is at stake

Yeah it took me a few years to catch on that those days I catch everyone's eye
Correspond with those nights of the month when the moon gleans like an egg in
the sky
And men are using a sense they don't even know they have just to watch me walk
by
And me, I'm supposed to be sensible, leave my animal outside to cry
But when all of nature conspires to make me her glorious whore
It's cause in my body I hold the secret recipe of precisely what life is for

And the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war
And I've said too much already but I'll tell you something more
To split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
So girl if that shit ain't up to you, then you simply are not free
Cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs I grow to term
To the expression that I wear, all I really own is me

I mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
Goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve
And in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age
Feminism ain't about equality, it's about reprieve

I will not lie down
On the wrongful ground or play
While it's still a radical sound
Just to call a spade a spade
Dear friends, women and men
Please check my math once more
In the totality of all war's history
There's but one common denominator
The answer is in the intention
That lies behind the question
Put that on your standardized multiple choice
I mean, how's this supposed to look to me
But half of divinity
Out there trying to make harmony
With only one voice

You know I've got experience
Looking right past the obvious
So I know what is so big and so close
Is always the hardest stuff
For us to reckon with
The hardest stuff to know

Dear friends, especially the women,
Tell me are you up to the task?
Of turning the wheel on human history
At long last

The answer is in the intention
That lies behind the question
Put that on your standardized multiple choice
I mean, how's this supposed to look to me
But half of divinity
Out there trying to make harmony
With only one voice

I will not lie down
On the wrongful ground or play
While it's still a radical sound
Just call a spade a spade

Dear friends, women and men
What better time to face
That we've been looking for
The answer to war
In the wrong place

He had all kind of reasons
why she was unable to love him
she was just too young
she was too high strung
she was afraid of commitment
but all of the theories
that he recited
played like the song
of the unrequited

baby, how long's it been now
since you held me to your chest
and told me that you love me
more than all the rest
it's such a shame that you won't talk to me
cuz i won't repeat after you
i believe that there is more to life
we coulda loved each other through
but i was afraid of commitment
when it came to you

i'll tell you, if there is one instinct
i just can't get with it all
it's the urge to kill something beautiful
just to hang it on your wall
are you just too young
are you too high strung
to actually follow through
on all the love you said you had
baby i never lied to you

is all or nothing
the best we can do?

I had to leave the house of fashion
And go forth naked from its doors
'cause women should be allies
And not competitors
I had to leave the house of god
Because the cross replaced the wheel
And the goddesses were all out in the garden
With the plants that nurture and heal

I had to leave the house of privilege
Spend christmas homeless and feeling bad
To learn privilege is a headache
That you don't know that you don't have
I had to leave the house of television
To start noticing the clouds
It's amazing the stuff you see when
You finally shed that shroud

I had leave the house of conformity
In order to make art
I had to be more and less true
To learn to tell the two apart
I had to leave the house of fear
Just about as soon as I could crawl
Ignore my face on a wanted poster
Stuck to the post office wall

I had leave the house of self-importance
To doodle my first tattoo
To realize a tattoo is no more permanent
Than I am, and who
Ever said that life is suffering
I think they had their finger on the pulse of joy
And the power of transcendence
Made its grace a practice we can employ

[No lyrics]