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Telling LP SPR20

by Friend of My Youth

/
1.
Soft Sci-Fi 03:36
I thought I’d find a way out. I made a place between. It’s over now, but it’s not so bad. Memory’s not what it used to be. It’s all wrong, but it feels like home to me. We’re growing old repeating. You’re smaller than you seemed. What happened happened, but I can’t help thinking it’s just as real as I let myself believe. I’m all right but it feels so wrong to me. I found a way to make it last, despite my worst intentions. The probabilities collapse again, and here I am. It’s crushing, and it’s telling, what you don’t know about me—if you saw what I see in my sleep, you wouldn’t try to lucid dream. It sings like a different song to me. I’m all right but it feels so wrong: There is no version of me that survives this long. I keep resetting the clock but I won’t stay gone. And if it’s something to you, it’s not my problem. Of all these infinite lives, it’s the sweetest one.
2.
Ancestral 02:58
Stay where I can. I’ll probably feel it the exact same way again. It’s hard to stay alone. Nobody wants to know me now. I saw you dead in a dream, but I’m still not happy. Probably never gonna be. Probably staying thirteen. I saved my weight in stones. I’m at the window with the lights out, ready to go. Your game, your move, this world a room. And I won’t know the name for this till I grow old and hard of fist, and strange of name, and far away, but nothing’s really changed. Constantine and me—I said I don’t want to talk about it again. I was a kid, I had my heart in ancestral homes. I know now.
3.
I’m coming back around, I’m wearing through. I feel it all the time now, like I’m supposed to. And that’s exactly why this room collapsed in size. I thought “I should get over myself” while you guys were getting high. You’re running out of patience. Well, so am I. It’s useful, and it’s the story we are choosing to believe, but the way I’m telling you, it’s hard to recognize: a symbol every scene, the ending wraps up clean, there’s no one still sad fifteen years on to fuck up Christmas Eve. Yeah, everybody’s changing, but mostly me. Why say it? You know what’s coming. Why make things worse for yourself? I’ll play dead. I like it fine now. I can’t keep it together while you shake hands. It’s complicated but it wasn’t what you were supposed to say.
4.
Thrall 03:15
Say you know it’s still not over. Yeah, you can’t really think it’s over. In front of your new friends, it will come back again. You’re gonna knock em dead. You’ll really have lost it then, because they let you in. You think your life is over. So sick of sealing up this house, so stupid saying it aloud. In everyone you know, there’s everything you don’t. It couldn’t hurt to try; already sure you won’t. I’m swinging through the walls. I’m talking to myself. Is this the time? Because I can taste it now. So are you living well? You’ve got to ask yourself, what if it’s always like this? You’re slipping now. You’ve got to ask yourself, what if I’m always like this? It’s made its home here now. You know it in yourself. You are the hollow house you learned to live without. You are the racing heart; he is the sprawling dark, a blindness closing in. It starts again. It’s got you in its thrall.
5.
It’s been a better year, but don’t get used to it. It’s all we can do not to inherit this. I occupy myself with my intrusive thoughts. Sometimes I think of you a lot. I used to think I’d be the one to pull you through. Those aren’t the people that we turned into. And if you ask me, this is way too soon—I’m spinning out away from you. How is this how it is? I might as well have been a stranger all our lives to you, for all the good I do. How is this how it is? I might as well have been a south sky satellite to you, always drifting out of view.
6.
Tourist Town 02:59
You said, “In time I think you’ll learn to like it.” It’s a steadying hand. It’s the feeling of fangs coming in. Yes, I am surging with violence, and that’s all that this is. I don’t learn the rules; I wish for more wishes. I’m gone. I’m moving on. I’ve seen enough, let’s not go down this road. Just act like nothing’s wrong, I’ll make it home, and when I leave I’ll leave alone because I need to know. And I won’t say that you’ll be better off, but I can tell you you’ll be fine, sometimes.
7.
So am I working out? Make me an enemy. I make my friends despise me so they’ll think about me. I’m not outside your door; I don’t do that anymore. I just go dark and act bored. Maybe I can’t hang. So come on and let me in. I’ll stand too close and get distant. There’s nothing I won’t do to feel that kind of rush again. Yeah, I’m a sucker still, since the second year of camp. But that’s twenty bucks I’d spend again if I still had the chance. Maybe I don’t change. Are you setting me aside? Do you want to? Is it worth it if I tell myself I told you so? The answer’s still no. I want to talk about you. I want to be someone you talk to. I want to say the right thing one thousand times more than I do. But if you’re staying home, that’s understandable. I just go on and on and on. I just talk in circles.
8.
Zelda 03:20
So I’ll go. I’ll slip back home. I pull the chain, I listen in. These walls are sick with sound I nearly understand. But your circumstances often have kept me up all night. I rest my head in the corner. I get close. You and I, we’re not alike. You lashing out, I turn inside. But I have existed in the difference between not trying to and trying not to be unanswered questions for my friends and family. It’s a distinction that’s more than clear to me. And I don’t know who’s in my house when I’m not home but I’m not out. That line is dead, but I’ll take my chances. I take what I can get, when I can stand it. If only, if it were up to me I’d leave you here to haunt this house with someone else. I’d take the short way down, level the place on my way out, leave no change of address. It’ll be better then, I guess. But then there’s April 26, 1972: your uncles shaking hands, your room set up for you. This house is clean, I know you know. I forced the key but I can’t go. I dragged myself across the floor.
9.
Cobalt 03:10
In ’68, you were the fastest kid in class. You left them gasping in your tracks, took them to state. You’d move away, grow into something out of nothing, marry late. Your mother one day wouldn’t know you in some white fluorescent place. It’s like a dream from which you can’t remember waking. The shade you cast there will not let you go. It seems impossible sometimes, I know. Your heart gives way. Sinew and muscle going soft—your body’s telling you what mine could not. But you’ll be okay. You’ll live the life that you are used to; I’ll decide which one of us is gonna pay. You speak between the lines, like you’ve been keeping something secret all this time. And if we’re not naming names then you can call me what you want to, but you don’t know mine. It’s sad to say, it’s the way it is, if we were looking for an answer in all of this. Sometimes it ends and we just forget. But the things we’ve done cannot hang motionless forever. The hand that held you may now cast you down. Some calls will not die out unanswered. See you around sometimes, I guess. I have to believe it’s for myself I’m letting go. If that’s the last I say, you’ll know when death takes you.
10.
Half Home 03:59
Giveaway/an open end. I said too much this time. Start again. I said enough this time. Start again. It’s in your mother’s eyes. It’s at your father’s table. I want to lift you up. I want to tear away from. It’s in your childhood bed, under the winter roses. We let the wolf inside; we left the door wide open. And are the children home? Are the curtains smoking? I am an empty glass. I never left the ocean. But I am new somehow. I’m not the one who stayed. And you’re the one who wins, but I don’t have to play. So you can gut my room, or you can save my place. I’m sick of feeling bad for someone else’s shame. And if I speak your name, then that’s the choice I made. And if I never say—

about

This is a split release between Salinas Records and Secret Pennies Records. Cassette release on Phat'n'Phunky Records.

BUY LP HERE: friendofmyyouth.bandcamp.com/album/telling

credits

released July 19, 2019

On this recording, Friend of My Youth is Indiana, Andy, and Spencer. This is LP1.

Recorded and mixed by Nathan Lawson at Temple of Tooth.

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Secret Pennies Records Corvallis, Oregon

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