There’s nothing new around in this dead man’s town
Nothing to do in a dead man’s world
Maybe I’ll take a chance on another midnight romance
Involving cars and a girl
Hot summer nights turn into broken dreams
When the rain comes down
Well, let the rain wash away the sadness
That has fallen on this town
There’s a friend of mine who spends his time cryin’
That he’s lived all his life in a cage
He turns the air blue with his anger
The moment he hits the stage
He writes songs about the mean life
What it’s like to suffer for just being born
You can find him playing his trumpet
Under the Pulaski Skyway just before dawn
I’m sick and tired of playing this same old scene
It feels like a story out of some cheap magazine
Like a cardboard hero right out of the old A-Team
The guys are looking real street-corner cool
But they’re just kids with too much time and nothing to do
Once the plug has been pulled on the American Dream
I used to love to come get you with my engine screaming down your block
And then burning rubber in the street
It used to be the only way to break the lethargy
Brought on by the crazy summer heat
As the sun would go down we’d go into town
And maybe then drive to the sea
And all my troubles would seem so far away
When you’d be with me
I was gone for twelve years and when I came back
All my fears became as real as night and day
The folks I loved for so long have all broken up
And gone their own separate ways
We held on for what seems like so long
And now I need you more than ever
‘Cause we’re slipping away
But at least we’ll be slipping together
Well, I’m not the kind of person that gets off on being sad
But a poor excuse for an existence makes me so mad
‘Cause it gets even the best of the good men down
I try to light the fire but I still can’t find the spark
And there’s nothing left for me to do but sit alone in the dark
There’s never anything new in a dead man’s town
©2023 The Hesh Inc.
These lyrics date back to the time I was still serving in the IDF and wishing I was at the Jersey Shore, in the second half of the 1980s. The scene is entirely imagined in my mind's eye, perhaps influenced by the slower tracks from Born In The USA. I pictured a scenario in which I was trying to win back the affections of my childhood crush, whose domestic situation seemed to have gone to hell along with the town she lived near. Never did I imagine that just a short year or so later I'd actually be back in that town, and I'd see that it really had gone to hell in the interim (as depicted in my song, "Knocked Out in the First Round"). So the lyrics did prove prescient, if not prophetic.
When I was laying plans for the expanded version of my Soul In Exile magnum opus, I put this song in the track list, thinking it would enhance the story being told. But in the end, I decided to scale it back and so this song remains an outtake.