Track 11: The Great Inversion

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NOTES:

Last song on the album. Last song written, last song recorded...and I wasn't even sure if it'd vibe with the rest of the project...but I put it on because it was important to me.

I wrote this just days after watching The Corporation and reflecting on what it means to live truly subversively in a world that is so commercialized, materialized, and militarized.

There is this great part in the Gospels where Jesus basically offers an opposing alternative to all that the religious establishment found to be true. He says, You heard it said this way, but I tell you this... and it's still so moving to me today.

Once again, the religious and political and retail establishments pump out all this shit about how the world really works, as though these are some sort of universal, context-less, ahistorical ideas. So much of what I hear in churches (and I don't hear much in them anymore) is so self-centered, all about me, all about comfort.

I see this revolutionary saying, You heard it said from politicians and pastors that violence for peace's sake is justified or get security in life no matter what it takes or pay no attention to where you buy your stuff... but I say to you love is the only way, and I remind you that the Son of Man had no place to rest his head, and when I said to love your neighbor, I meant all your neighbors... or at least that's what I hear him saying.

LYRICS:

Come, my child, away
Come away where we can be
Come, my child, away
Come away, away with me

Don't you know it?
Child, I hear you when you call
All your groaning and moaning, postponing the owning of everything
I can feel it in all

But that was not the plan
Or I should say, it's not the dream
Greedy privitization, big fat corporations, some one Christian nation
How'd they think that's what I mean?

Come, my child, away
Come away where we can be
Come, my child, away
Come away, come and see

They said eye for eye
But I tell you cheek by cheek
They said hustle and work to be comfortable, powerful
I say blessed are the meek

But twist and turn my words
And you could wage war on half the earth
You could kill all the others, the sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers
Mark them by place of birth

Come, my child, away
Come away where we can be
Come, my child, away
Come away and now be free

Don't waste your life away
Waitin' on that brighter day
You really are the one
To bring the healing that's begun... 'cause it's begun

And it's all in love I say
Don't opt for a diff'rent way
Stop swallowin' their cliché
As if it's the only way, it's overplayed

And everyone's overpaid
But feel like we can't get away
A new car won't save the day
It's not the way

I said you would be free
And I mean free indeed
Free from that white, middle-class American Dream
Free from lonliness, free from greed

Just pick up and follow me
To Kingdom Come
A place where we all will run
A new life that has begun
Right now it has begun

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