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1.
I have no memory Of my family Without my sisters There beside me We sang proudly for our father I was leader, the eldest daughter Eldest daughter, older sister Daddy’s little war-resister I’ve worked hard, but never harder For the esteem of my dear father My dear father, smooth operator A skilled and cunning troublemaker My mother’s protests met with refusal Left us wanting for his approval He was California bound He was California bound Still feel the sting of his absence now He was California bound
2.
The city is restless it shifts and it sighs Sometimes I need someone to help me survive The fear our resistance isn’t what it should be Is calmed by the promise that you see in me The first time that we met We were the last ones left On the picket lines at Bay and Bloor We snuck into a train yard Climbed up on a billboard Looking over Davenport My mother always told me There was nothing for me In this city anymore But perched above the traffic In our winter jackets You would prove my mother wrong The tenements haunted, the back alleys prowled They were built brick by brick with a masonry trowel And in the same way a brand new city grew Spreading out over top of one I already knew The bar booths and the cafes That became our mainstays I had somehow missed before Where the old guard and the new Came to reconcile the two By moving the goalposts once more Anarchists debating How we should be creating The preconditions for class war This became the backdrop Stuck behind our laptops ’Til we were wonderin’ what we do this for Soon we created a new kind of love One that I had not thought I was capable of You revealed to me the best parts of myself And refused to allow me to be anyone else Some nights were eternal Pages of our journal Spread out on the bedroom floor Working straight to deadline Getting drunk on cheap wine Once we couldn’t work no more My mother always told me There was nothing for me In this city anymore But smoking at the station After the demonstration You would prove my mother wrong The city is restless it shifts and it sighs Sometimes I need someone to help me survive
3.
The silver in the pixel The ripple in the sheen The dissolve of the trace left By my fingers on the screen The glitch pierces the surface The glow distorts the dream The unblinking eyes of lovers The purr of our machines What could we become in your untamed imagination? Can you capture it in language? Could you write it down for me? Oh my lovers Let’s keep this fire burning This flame is yours alone I’ll tend your fire with letters A love without letters Is a love I’ve never known The blush left by the rapture Your fingers across my skin The sting left by the rupture The warmth left by the sting The rising of a breastbone The spreading of a thigh My lover is a lion She lifts an amber eye Can we still imagine our love as an act of liberation? A conversation that demands the very best of me Oh my lovers Let’s keep this fire burning This flame is yours alone I will tend your fire with letters A love without letters Is a love I’ve never known When I imagine my lovers It is dark and they are dreaming Scattered ‘cross a continent bathed in unending night When I am lonely, despairing I can recall the feeling My touch becomes a solace before I return to the fight
4.
Middle Child 02:32
I have no memory Of my family Without my sisters There beside me There is power in what is whispered The soothing song of my middle sister Middle sister, 2nd arrival My beloved, unwitting rival She learned to side step my confrontation Silent witness to separation Separation, it landed heavy Could feel it coming, but we weren’t ready I felt an anger that burned and blistered Set me apart from my younger sisters They were California bound They were California bound A family scattered across the land They were California bound
5.
A hole is cut into razor wire A flame is set in a stack of tires A streak of white cuts the inky black An arc retraced as they hurl it back You flew across an ocean to take a photograph To reaffirm a truth that we just couldn’t seem to grasp But when you came back home you found the argument had shifted We seem to reinvent the wheel with each atrocity committed I know you you’re still haunted by things that you’ve seen Ducking the bullets on the streets of Jenin The first time you wondered if you’d make it home When you put down your camera and picked up a stone The cigarettes you smuggled from the European Union Helped convince your sources that you weren’t in collusion Ate olives in the sun, tried to avoid undue attention Calculated risk, will it be death or just detention? I know you you’re still haunted by things that you saw Caged in queue at Qalandiya Tell me where do you feel most alone Overseas, or back at home? A hole is cut into razor wire A flame is set in a stack of tires A streak of white cuts the inky black An arc retraced as they hurl it back 20 years ago I guess it would be Nicaragua Shooting photos of insurgents from a rooftop in Managua 40 years ago I guess you’d be in Vietnam Stonewalled by the proxies in the green zones of Saigon I know you you’re still haunted by things that you saw in a Gaza City hospital You don’t have to tell me, just know that you can Won’t try to pretend that I understand
6.
Toronto 2010 04:39
Tired without complaint Elbow deep in wheatpaste Six months worth of heartache From thinkin’ back a decade To when we brought down the fences Then just stood and stared And found we were an army Completely unprepared Kept me awake With questions Drafting broadsheets on the floor Asking my take On how this time Would be different than before Remember the reports From Athens and Madrid A flank of cops beat back By a thousand unarmed kids But Toronto 2010 This is how we fought Each city gets a riot This is the one mine got You caught my eye On Yonge Street Undone like streets before. Patrol car fire The emblem Of the lack of something more Barricades of shield and boot Sniper scopes trace out our route Morning raids took seventeen Called it a conspiracy Now five years later Still feel the anger A failure wasted Barely debated The mass detentions The infiltrations Are we still spinning That this is winning? And we recall Each city For how its people fight Play back the tapes And show me Which parts we got right
7.
Breakdown 03:40
If I seem a little jittery I can't restrain myself I'm falling into fancy fragments - can't contain myself Now I can stand austerity but it gets a little much When there's all these livid things that you never get to touch I'm gonna breakdown, yeah Feel my brain like porridge coming out of my ears and I was expecting reverie I've taken leave of my senses - and I'm in arrears my legs buckle over - I'm living on my knees Whatever makes me tick it takes away my concentration Sets my hands a-trembling - gives me frustration So I hear that two is company for me it's plenty trouble though my double thoughts are clearer now that I am seeing double I'm gonna breakdown, yeah Oh mom can I grow out of what's too big for me I'll give up that ghost before it gives up me I wander loaded as a crowd, A nowhere wolf of pain Living next to nothing, my nevermind remains I'm gonna breakdown, yeah
8.
In the decades free of terror on the lip of the Great Lakes In a century that ended before a new one took its place We found each other early and fell into our embrace A body grown beside a body knows that body’s shape The city starts to buckle, sympathetic to the storm Clutched against the caprock, a crack begins to form The fissure in the asphalt where we buried our desire And gathered in the wintertime to feed its tender fire You isolate the pressure point and pierce it with a pin The truths I leave to harden into knots beneath my skin A surge in the transistor showers us in spark Pulses through the power lines and leaves us in the dark Jealous as the shipwreck, lonely as the flood I led love to the lakeshore and I laid it in the mud You left it to the tempest to be rusted by the rains Iron sharpens iron, there is iron in our veins And now my shoulders slacken in the warm pacific breeze In a city doomed to disappear sometime this century On the far side of a season I long for your embrace A body grown beside a body knows that body’s shape
9.
Promise to remind me Why we set the bar so high So hard to remember When we’re barely getting by A repertoire of failure Battles lost, concessions won Seems strange to look back now And consider what we’ve done Promise you won’t let me Be undone by my mistakes Sorry I can’t tell you How many times it’s gonna take Can we call it a resistance If we’re always in retreat? Outsmarted and outnumbered Outmaneuvered on the street I guess I’m getting older I guess I’m getting older I bet you’re getting older too Steel sharpens steel Can it also thicken skin? To admit that we’re losing Is to allow we can win Let depression lead us To the edges of our wounds Curl ourselves like sisters ‘Round the hollow in our wombs I guess I’m getting tired I guess I’m losing patience I bet you’re losing patience too I guess that I’m despairing I know that I still want this I hope that you still want it too
10.
The Fix 05:22
I was still finding the words They were publishing your piece I was still finding my courage You were fighting the police And I wanted so badly to do what you were able to Easier to just fall in love with you You wanted to retreat To be shielded from view All the people that you loved Expected things from you You felt you knew the part I wanted you to play Easier to just turn and walk away The panic when you meet someone who’ll change you The terror once you know you have to tell them When you’re already sure how they’ll receive it Yeah, you’ve always been able to take it or to leave it I said it didn’t hurt That it was just a bruise Still I tried to turn myself Into something you could use But my constant return to the rawness of the wound Allowed me to admit this was about more than you So I took every chance And learned to follow through Until others saw in me, what I had seen in you I learned to think of love As risk and gratitude Had a been lying if I’d said, I didn’t still want that with you The panic when you meet someone who’ll change you The terror once you know you have to tell them When you’re already sure how they’ll receive it Yeah, you’ve always been able to take it or to leave it Last summer I took a lover I saw my younger self in her Told her the love she Wanted from me She should look to herself for I never once told her a lie She cried through our goodbye So now you’ve hit some walls Found the rules that you obey To protect yourself from some, keep everyone away There’s a tension in your chest that reason won’t undo You find it’s I who has something to teach you Somehow we have held on to a friendship Despite all the discomfort and the bullshit By now there’s no need to even say it But you’ve always been able to take it or to leave it
11.
I have no memory of my family Without my sisters there beside me The dimpled cheek where I first kissed her Little song bird, baby sister Baby sister, a child no longer Growing wiser, growing stronger Our father’s bedside, that cruel December I wondered which parts she remembered I’ll remember that night forever Death had brought us back together We sang a song we’d learned as children And for our father, we sang as women We are California bound We are California bound To spread some ash upon the sand We are California bound

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released March 24, 2015

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Clare O'Connor & Corbin Murdoch Vancouver, British Columbia

Equal parts earnest and incisive, Work Songs is an album by Clare O'Connor and Corbin Murdoch. Originally composed for the theatre, it is a song-cycle that asks what we can salvage from personal loss and political despair.

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