[2002-10-29] downloaded and deHTMLified

Ani DiFranco: Up Up Up Up Up Up [¿?]
(c)1999 Righteous Babe Records

 1. 'Tis of Thee
 2. Virtue
 3. Come Away
 4. Jukebox
 5. Angel Food
 6. Not Angry Anymore
 7. Everest
 8. Up Up Up
 9. Known Now Then
10. Trickle Down
11. Hat Shaped Hat


1. 'Tis of Thee

They caught the last poor man on a poor man's vacation
They cuffed him and they confiscated his stuff
And they dragged his black ass down to the station
And said "ok the streets are safe now.
All your pretty white children can come out to see spot run"
And they came out of their houses and they looked around
But they didn't see no one.
And my country 'tis of thee
To take swings at each other on talk show tv
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
'Cause we'll never live long enough to
Undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you

And above 96th street,
They're handing out smallpox blankets
So people don't freeze
The old dogs they got a new trick
It's called criminalize the symptoms
While you spread the disease
I hold on hard to something
Between my teeth when I'm sleeping
And I wake up and my jaw aches
And the earth is full of earthquakes
And my country 'tis of thee
To take shots at each other on prime time tv
Why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
'Cause we'll never live long enough to
Undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you

They caught the last poor man
Flying away in a shiny red cape
And they took him down to the station
And they said "boy you should know better
Than to try and escape"
And I ran away with the circus
'Cause there's still some honest work left for bearded ladies
But it's not the same goin' town to town
Since they put everyone in jail 'cept
The cleavers and the bradys
And my country 'tis of thee
To take swings at each other on talk show tv
Why, why don't you just go ahead and turn off the sun
'Cause we'll never live long enough to
Undo everything they've done to you
Undo everything they've done to you


2. Virtue

Virtue is relative at best
There's nothing worse than a sunset
When you're driving due west
And I'm afraid that my love
Is gonna come up short
There is no there there
I guess I'm scared
Cuz I want to have good news to report
Every time I come up for air
Now I'm cruising through a chromakey blue sky
And I know that in an hour or three
The sun is gonna be in my eyes
And I know that sometimes all I can see
Is how I feel
Like the whole world is on the other side of a dirty windshield
And I'm tryin to see through the glare
Yes I'm struggling just to see what's there

The one person who really knows me best
Says I'm like a cat
Yeah the kind of cat that you just can't pick up
And throw into your lap
No, the kind that doesn't mind being held
Only when its her idea
Yeah, the kind that feels what she decides to feel
When she is good and ready to feel it

And now I am prowling through the backyard
And I am hiding under the car
I have gotten out of everything
I've gotten into so far
I eat when I am hungry
And I travel alone
And just outside the glow of the house
Is where I feel most at home

But in the window you sometimes appear
And your music is faint in my ears

Virtue is relative at best
There's nothing worse than a sunset
When you're driving due west
And I'm afraid that my love
Is gonna come up short
There is no there there
I guess I'm scared
I want to have good news to report
Every time I come up for air


3. Come Away

Come, come away
Come away from
Come away from it
Come, come away
Come away from
Come away from it
Won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Why won't you
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Come
Come away from
Come away
Come away from
Won't you come
Come away
Come away from
Next to the glass ashtray
In a little plastic baggy
Is a bitter rock remedy
Really good stuff
But I take offense to the fact
That you're so hell bent
You try to tell me this world
Just isn't beautiful enough?
Do you wanna get off
Is this your stop
Do you gotta have a triple decker super fudge sundae
With a goddam cherry on top
I mean, what makes you so lavish that you can afford
To spend ever sober moment feeling angry and bored
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Why
Why won't you come
Come away from
We used to hold hands down
Those unfamiliar streets
You used to take me diving
Into the watery blue deep
But now you're trying to find every tiny treasure
Every shiny penny of pleasure
Satisfy every selfish purpose
Before you swim back up to the surface
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Why
And you think that I just don't like it anymore
But I'll tell you what I don't like
I don't like that I have to put the training wheels back on your bike
And I don't like the extravagance
Or the way you taste when I kiss you
I don't like being left alone
Baby don't you think I miss you
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it
Why
Come away from
Come away from it
Why won't you come
Come away from
Come away from it


4. Jukebox

In the jukebox of her memory
The list of names flips by and stops
And she closes her eyes
And smiles as the record drops
Then she drinks herself up and out of her kitchen chair
And she dances out of time
As slow as she can sway
As long as she can say
This dance is mine
This dance is mine
Her hair bears silent witness
To the passing of time
Tattoos like mile markers
Map the distance she has gone
Winning some, losing some
But she says my sister still calls every sunday night
After the rates go down
And I still can never manage to say anything right
And my whole life blew up
And now its all coming down
She says, leave me alone
Tonight I just wanna stay home
She fills the pot with water
And she drops in the bone
She says,  I've got a darkness that I have to feed
I got a sadness that grows up around like a weed
And I'm not hurting anyone
I'm just spiraling in
And then she closes her eyes
And hears the song begin again
She appreciates the phone calls
The consoling cards and such
She appreciates all the people
Who come by and try to pull her back in touch
They try to hold the lid down tightly
And they try to shake well
But the oil and water
They just wanna separate themselves
She drinks herself up and out of her kitchen chair
And she dances out of time
As slow as she can sway
As long as she can say
This dance is mine
This dance is mine
This dance is mine


5. Angel Food

If the mattress was a table top
And the bed sheet was a page
We'd be written out
Like a couple of question marks
My convex to your concave
We'd be lying here
At the end of a sentence
That asks

Are you ready now
Are you gonna glow in the dark
Are you gonna show me how

Do you like to watch when water misbehaves
Do you like waves
As the wind shifts
And shifts again
The sail smiles
And gently slaps around the mast
Ballast
Ballast
Ballast

When you come to me
Come to me with cake
In your pocket
Come to me nicely
With that soft kinda cake
That's mostly icing
Come to me ready and rude
Bring me angel food
Angel food


6. Not Angry Anymore

Growing up, it was just me and my mom against the world.
And all my sympathies were with her when I was a little girl
And I've seen both my parents play out the hands that they were dealt
As each year goes by, I know more about how my father must have felt.
I just want you to understand that I know what all the fighting
Was for, and I just want you to understand that I'm not angry anymore.
No, I'm not angry anymore.
She taught me how to wage cold war with quiet charm
But I just want to walk through my life unarmed.
To accept, and just get by like my father learned to do,
But without all the acceptance of getting by that got my father through
I just want you to understand that I know what all the fighting was for
And I just want you to understand that I'm not angry anymore.
No, I'm not angry anymore.
Night falls like people into love
We generate our own light to compensate
For the lack of light from above.
Every time we fight a cold wind blows our way,
We can learn like the trees, how to bend,
How to sway and say
I, I think I understand
What all this fighting is for,
And I just want you to understand
I'm not angry anymore.
No, I'm not angry anymore.


7. Everest

From the depth of the pacific
To the height of everest
And still the world is smoother
Than a shiny ball-bearing
So I take a few steps back
And put on a wider lens
And it changes your skin,
Your sex, and what your wearing
Distance shows your *silhouette*
To be a lot like mine
Like a sphere is a sphere
And all of us here
Have been here all the time
Yeah, we've been here all the time*
You brought me to church
Cinder blocks, flourescent light
You brought me to church
At seven o'clock on a sunday night
And the band was rockin'
And the floors were scrubbed clean
And everybody had a tambourine
So I took a deep breath and became
The white girl with the hair
And you sat right beside me
While everybody stared
And through the open window
I think the singing went outside
And floated up to tell
All the stars not to hide
'Cuz by the time church let out
The sky was much clearer
And the moon was so beautiful
That the ocean held up a mirror
As we walked home we spoke slowly
We spoke slow
And we spoke lowly
Like it was taking more time
Than usual to choose
The words to go
With your squeaky sandal shoes
Like time is not a thing
Thats ours to lose
From the height of the pacific
To the depths of the everest...


8. Up Up Up

Up up up up up up
Points the spire of the steeple
But god's work isn't done by god
It's done by people
Up up up up up up
Points the fingers of the trees
The lumberjacks
With their bloody axes
Are on their knees
And just when you think that you've got enough
Enough grows
And everywhere that you go in life
Enough knows
Up up up up up up
Dances the steam from the sewer
As she rounds the corner
The brutal wind blows right through her
Up up up up up up
Raises the stakes of the game
Each day sinks its bootprint into her clay
And she's not the same
And just when you think that you've got enough
Enough grows
And everywhere that you go in life
Enough knows
And half of learning how to play
Is learning what not to play
And she's learning the spaces she leaves
Have their own things to say
Then she's trying to sing just enough
So that the air around her moves
And make music like mercy
That gives what it is
And has nothing to prove
She crawls out on a limb
And begins to build her home
It's enough just to look around
To know she's not alone
Up up up up up up
Points the spire of the steeple
But god's work isn't done by god
It's done by people


9. Known Now Then

It's not so much that we got closer
It's that her face just got bigger
And by the time it was filling up my whole view
I figured my face had gotten bigger too
So I used it to try and sway her
Say something to her
Make my case
But my face
Never had a chance
All along it was the wrong song and dance
I just stood there
Without even a stance
Helpless to he advance
And her retreat
Backspace, delete
It wasn't so much that we fell in love as
My life just seemed to come down
To a slow walk on a straight line
Between her smile and her frown
And maybe we never were as close
As we should have been
But I didn't know what I know now, then
Yeah, I didn't know what I
Know now, then


10. Trickle Down

You cease to smell the steel plant after you've lived here for a while
Smoke is snow is ash are leaves that blow through the air aloft
And our houses dim their siding to the same soot grey style
And we hang our laundry out on sundays when they turn the furnaces off
And everybody's daddy works up on the line
The steinbrenners and the wilczewskis have been here the longest time
And everybody's mommy squints into the sun
Sunday afternoon after all the laundry's done

Sometimes a distant siren can set a dog to barking late at night
And then it dominos on down 'til every dog is joining in
And the first rumors of the lay-offs sing like a distant siren might
And we all perked up our ears and paced the fence of the ensuing din
And every night were glued to the tv news at six o'clock
'Cuz it was hard to tell what was real and what was talk
And they explained about the cutbacks all with earnest frowns
But what they didn't say was that the plant was slowly shutting down

This town is not the kind of place that money people go
They make their jokes up on the tv about all the snow
And they're building condos down river from where the plant had been
But nobody really lives here now that the air is clean
And the president assured us that it was all gonna trickle down
Like it'd be raining so much money that we'd be sad to see the sun
Mr. wilczewski's brother had some business out in denver so they left town
Everybody knows they were the lucky ones

You cease to smell the steel plant after you've lived here for a while


11. Hat Shaped Hat

In walked a man in the shape of a man
Holding a hat-shaped hat
And he held up two fingers and said "how many fingers?"
And I said, "peace man, that's where it's at."
I said, you are what you do in order to
Prevent becoming what you're busy not doing
And if you do do it truly
And you arive at it newly
Then in the end you are absolved
And the problem of heaven is solved
And the man broke into a smile
Like he was breaking into song
And he was broken and smiling and I was singing along
And we compleed agretely about most things
'Til the sun set sweetly like it does in those paintings
The ones they hang in the hotel rooms
The ones they bolt to the walls
As if anyone would want to steal them at all
And we talked like children without breathing
Until I stopped this lady as she was leaving
And I said, excuse me
But do you know what time it would be
If we were on mars?
And she held up her hand
Like a crossing guard stopping the cars
And she said
Five in the morning
In walked a man in the shape of a man holding a hat-shaped hat

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