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Can't escape this Nat Johnson. I found out she wrote "Dog" after watching dogs being walked in a park in Sheffield... about a mile from where I lived while I was there... so naturally I was drawn to it...
Nat Johnson - "Not Now, Horse"
I put this here knowing nobody will listen to it, because it's pretty serious stuff. It is the kind of thing where, if you put in the time and digest it, the song is amazing. But getting to that point is hard work, it's not a simple song.
(The video is just her, at various points in Sheffield.)
Her lyrics are absolutely poetry. I mean, this is a poem set to music. Not an easy poem. it is top-notch, Dana-level work. This is what serious artists do... here we go:
"Not Now, Horse"
Swallowed flies escalate horseward
Not now, horse; be saddled or be swept away on a lungful of the cold dawn air, heavy, neighing cloud!
Little turnips grow. Leave them alone
Do not dig; their enormity is all a myth
Let them sleep in earth, as we all must do, when all your dirty dramas are as still as you
Sink your withering words without sound in the shallows
Let me throw your voice to the nesting sparrows
Be silent now – it’s almost dark enough to hear all those songs you forgot to love
Finish what you’ve begun, leaving things badly drawn
Light arrives from the sun, a billion babies born
As, thighbones high, we wade out and out and out and out
Until we become nothing...
...And are everything, things we’ve never seen
We breathe out at last, we breathe out at last
She starts by guiding a horse and by the end she is instructing herself, or all of us;
Maybe if we give up all our dramas, we are born into a new dawn; and can finally see our own breath, like a neighing cloud, in the cold dawn air.
"it’s almost dark enough to hear all those songs you forgot to love" -- wow sometimes a line will just stand, wonderful all by itself.
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