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There Is an Ocean

from The Pottsville Conglomerate by Pete Davis

/

about

I wrote this song back in 2005. I remember sitting at my computer while my freshman roommate in college played Socom with his friends via headset. I also entered this into a song-writing competition and was supposed to have won a free capo (a nice one where you don't have to unscrew it every time to move it, which I really could have used!) but Jeol never sent it to me.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a class called "Intro to Electronic Music." We learned about Cage and Babbitt and all that, and then got to work with Pro-Tools (on a Mac). I had been using Audacity to mix all my stuff thus far, and for the final for the class we were asked to record a song of around 3 minutes and meet a quota of various mixing techniques in Pro-Tools on the finished product. Having lost my patience with adjusting to the Mac OS interface, I decided to, instead of writing a new song and doing everything in Pro-Tools (something quite infuriating at the time), take a song I had already written, record it in a day in my basement back home, and mix it all in Audacity. I turned it in without ever seeing the Mac or Pro-Tools, and got an A for the class. She never knew. She was too busy gushing over some kid making some pretty lame electro stuff anyway.

It was a cool class, though.

lyrics

It used to be that we were
All of us alone, with our intent to stay that way

The mountains came
To push us apart
And we obeyed
Without question or strain
But some wouldn't budge
So they bore right on through
The barricades

And held tight onto each other
With their own intent to stay

Hollow the sound of the footsteps above,
And you can feel its eyes are watching
The sun has set so many times

So pray that it goes away
And pray that it doesn’t return
So dark the coming days

So cover your eyes again
I'll cover your mouth with my hand
Your sweet breath all the same

And nobody hears it now
And nobody suspects a thing
Before I dig this grave,
Who do you call for?

Under the shadows, the auspices,
Guided to rake of this land all the fates we disbelieve
So cover your eyes again.

It used to be the ones we loved,
The ones we carried with us
It used to be the skies above
Would fill with the blackest smoke and
High, Heaven will know the place I go,
I know, I know, oh I know
Everything else it used to be
Is it better now?

(Hope carry us under,
Breathe into us, always
Calm strains suffice,
Ever soft, signify
Let our hearts fill with tears
Let our eyes fill with blood)

credits

from The Pottsville Conglomerate, released July 5, 2011
P Davis: everything

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Pete Davis Princeton, New Jersey

zany folk music for nerds

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