Night falls and the lightning strikes
The night I left my home behind
Whoever sends the lightning down is looking for me
“Better close the windows, boy, ‘cause you’re on my mind”
In Penn Station a brother comes up
Begs for help with tears in his eyes
Is there any good left in you or are you totally gone
I knew it was a sign from the sky
And me, I couldn’t make peace with where the mainstream led me
Toward the green fields everyone calls “Mature”
I stood under the canopy and made promises I meant
But then I broke them ‘cause I couldn’t be too sure
I planted my seed and watched the flower grow
And I’d nurture it if I knew I could
But the metal band around my finger now takes up a hidden space
And there it stays till I know I can make good
But now I got a hellhound on my tail
Haunted by the beat of a thousand phantom snare drums
Massed wah-wah guitars wail
Propelling my heart like sixty-four-time tom toms
The bass lines are throbbing inside of my head
Those snarling riffs are gonna tear me to shreds
Stop-time solos batter at my brain
Till it all drives me free-form insane
Darkness falls and calls out my name
Each night I sleep alone on the couch
The constitution is still hanging on the wall
But I escaped it via diplomatic pouch
The glass that was broken on six-two-one-eight-eight
Is shattered now beyond all repair
In the woman’s need for love she gave herself to me
In my restlessness I looked elsewhere
I used to be earth, air, fire, and water
Now is it destiny to mellow out and die
And all the wild images I whipped up in a fury
Turn out to be such a desperate lie
That Penn Station brother, he shows his true colors
A bad actor, cruel hoax, clever fake
And the aforementioned golden coil of institution
Now resides at the bottom of Deal Lake
But now the foamy curls violently pound
Dragging me under in an amplified seashell roar
Broken glass flies and cuts deeply with no sound
And penetrates like a razor to the core
The cannons are booming relentlessly
Phosphorus shells exploding senselessly
Some kind of war raging and I realize
I’m fighting on both sides
The mother of the tribe, she’s living all alone
On the far side of heartbreak street
Her husband left her and the children have gone
Now it’s just the radio and her own heartbeat
There’s a party going on this Friday night
All the lost souls and their graduating class
But when the clock hits midnight, all the kids dissolve
The music over, the festivities past
Then the silence falls and shrouds the house
And once again she goes to bed alone
She dreams about slipping off to Australia
To dump this place she’s stuck calling home
And me, I’m just another streak of light on the highway
Running from all that’s ostensibly good
Faster than the speed of right from abuser to savior
To treat her like she never was but should
But now I feel like I’m exploding
Involuntary thrust in an uncontrolled spasm
Pressure is building like a bowling ball rolling
To crescendo in a violent orgasm
I swore Never Again to these scenes
But I can’t escape acting on these dreams
Gliding toward the waterfall determined not to stop
And over the brink I resolutely drop
Smokestack lightning rumblethunder booming
Bowled over by Spectorian wall of sound
In the final act, apocalypse mushrooming
As full-volume Wagner and Steinman resound
All semblance of order abandoned at last
All pretense to harmony jettisoned in the blast
The rules are abolished in the aftershock haze
And I’m standing alone in a daze
Watching dreams explode into multimillion pieces
And childhood comforts into infinite fragments
But what can I do until the chaos ceases
Except stand by in imperfect detachment
And no matter what I do to leave it behind me
It always finds a way to remind me
Regardless of where I am
When the night falls
When the night falls
©2024 The Hesh Inc.
This sprawling lyric of a song was written around the time my first marriage ended and I left Boston for the Jersey Shore. Like many of the tales spun in the lyrics to my Soul In Exile songs, these are all snippets and snatches of true stories, or at least based on them.
I later had the opportunity to record the music for it at the Electronic Music Lab at Brookdale Community College when I attended that school. I envisioned a merger between several rock epics—Lou Reed's "Street Hassle," Jim Steinman's "Faster Than the Speed of Night," and The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again." Somehow I managed to make it work ... but it was too damn long. I have since edited it and intend to record the newer, more concise version for one of the next installments of the Soul In Exile opus.
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