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Atlas

from Men by Rain Perry

/

lyrics

Atlas
words by Rain Perry, music by Rain Perry and Mark Hallman ©2013 Precipitous Music/BMI and Blue Racer Music/BMI
All rights reserved.

Atlas stood
Blood running down his chest
Knees buckling
Arms trembling
Trying to hold the world aloft
With the last of his strength
But the greater his effort
The more the world bore down
Till one terrible day
His broad shoulders shook
And he sank to the ground
No wind
No sound

Then a horn
Someone yelling
The noise of the city
The Titan Atlas set the world down
And the world just kept spinning
He cried out – staggered back
And was gone

After that Atlas bummed around
Grew his hair
Who would care?
Became a fixture where I work
At this little milky way bar
A big lunk of a guy
Sweet and broken
One night at closing he stumbled out to the boardwalk
And shook his fist at the sky

I said, “You need someplace to go tonight?”
He did.
He slept like a hurricane
He tossed and he turned
The Titan Atlas in my room
In the morning out the window
He was pacing the beach
Staring holes in the sea
I smiled down at him and he looked back at me
It was a strange little, sweet little domesticity
He went for light bulbs one day
And he came back with paint and a canvas
He couldn’t say way
They were just on the shelf at the hardware store
As he passed by
I think he felt kind of stupid, like a poseur
As he set it up in the corner of the room
But he picked up a brush
And painted a thick red line across the canvas
It looked kind of cool,
Like some kind of rescue symbol
Like what identifies a medic on the field
Then he picked up the purple
Then orange
Then red again
Red
Back to the store for more red for the lie that he’d believed for so long

Waves break
Gulls cry
The world spins on
After that came a blue period
Blue ocean of sorrow for the years he had lost
And that’s when the tears,
Oh the tears they finally came

And he slept he slept he slept for days
One morning at the table with my coffee I felt his smile
Nothing special about this day
Just another day
Just a man
Just another working man in the morning
Waves break
Gulls cry
The world spins on

credits

from Men, released August 6, 2013
Rain – vocal
Mark - Fibes drums, Fender Pbass, Heritage 535 through a Divided By Thirteen CJ11, Oberheim Matrix 8 synthesizer and percussion

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about

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Rain Perry Ojai, California

Rain Perry’s “Beautiful Tree” was the theme for the CW Network’s Life Unexpected, on which she also had the surreal pleasure of appearing as herself. She has released four albums on her own Precipitous Records, as well as writing and touring a solo play about her childhood. In 2016 she completed The Shopkeeper, her first film. She teaches a series of classes called Songwriting for Civilians. ... more

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