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Daily Lyric: NIGHT FALLS

Updated: Jan 9

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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