Get all 22 A.S. Coomer releases available on Bandcamp and save 55%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of picking flowers for the dead, ain't it hard?, The Glendale Tapes, The Byhalia Tapes, tulum, Songs for Leaving, Riversong (Memorial Potamology), Rural Eminence Volume III, and 14 more.
1. |
||||
|
Purchase paperback or ebook for text.
|
||||
2. |
||||
|
Purchase paperback or ebook for text.
|
||||
3. |
Lost Your Keys
03:26
|
|||
|
Purchase paperback or ebook for text.
|
||||
4. |
||||
|
Purchase paperback or ebook for text.
|
||||
5. |
||||
|
Purchase paperback or ebook for text.
|
||||
6. |
||||
|
As we lay low
Another of the gifted
A stray feather flutter-step dancing
Above the shifting snowpack
Drifts down to join the snowmelt
Another drop in the flow
Downstream, the dream everchanging
You’ll never wade out into the same river
No one ever does
Life a timelapse of the flood
We count the hours by the silt rings
Left on the sodden warping walls
With each tick a lessening
Recession gradual but never quite complete
Nature’s song swells
We bleed as we sing
✺
Those left behind
Met at the haunt
A flotilla of ghostships
Circling a single, tired mooring
We offered up our songs
Words swirling skyward in cloudsmoke
Raining down on brittle snowcrust
Easing towards a lessening
Erosion, sure, but welcome
Against choking alluvium
Our vice hardened hearts clotting
With detritus, mangled branches
& shorn shingles, mistakes & reckonings,
Otters, coots, and mallards displaced
Rain-soaked refugees wading
Through muck and debris
Seeking new, higher banks
Just like the rest of us
✺
There are those that take advantage
Use the roiling for dumping off
Tires and garbage, old appliances
& the lapped smooth stones of need
You can find them on the bridges
Shifty eyes scanning for witnesses
Dropping what is bald and useless
End over end ending in a splash wave
Lost in the tumultuous brown churning
The waters accept with indifference
Burying under or carrying along
Another abandoned verse of riversong
|
||||
7. |
Singing Sour Grapes
02:01
|
|||
|
When hope feels like the kink in the hose
‘cos what isn’t a garden after all?
& the dilapidated walls of your heart
Black and gettin’ blacker
Give up the ghost & all things corporeal
Sagging, all of it sagging
Flow below the valley low
The muddy water, grit in the teeth, stingers in the eyes
Will be the least of the molehills-turned-mountains
The range arranged in a range in a rage
You’re able to appreciate as your problems
Grapes unfit for anyone’s table wine
& whine you must but rust crusts the busted backseat springs
& there ain’t no room left upfront
Behind the black patch
Cracked blinds & misplaced time
Great heaping sweeps as deep as the dreams of The Last Sleep
You’re given the fence and a running start
but find the sheep stygian & immune to “how high?”
Pinky promises of “gettin’ by, by & large” in the cloven-footed future
A goat’s head soup of potential failures
Hoping against hope the sweet by-&-by’s more than this pigsty
Just another place in time to whither, rot, & die slowly
& just long enough for a Lott’s-Wife of a Last Look
at the breadcrumb trail of tiny failures
each glistening under the midnight sun
glinting like broken geodes
or splintered glass
An eternal exhale of indecision
|
||||
8. |
||||
9. |
Gundrunk Blues
02:15
|
|||
|
Bullets pump from the chambers of our magnum hearts
Lead and cordite course through our clotted veins
Poisoned blood singing songs of annihilation
Psalms of death
Our love on sale in the gun case
Thoughts & prayers scribbled illegibly on the receipt
All sales final, no returns
We told our children we’d do better
That this would never happen again
Not to us but here we are
Toeing the line
Nearing the cliff
Falling
Is there no bottom?
Hear the spent rounds
Clink against each other
Ceaselessly tolling death knells
Never-ending
Hear the classroom doors locking
In vain
Hear the school chairs thrown away
From the knee-high tables
Panting fear huddled underneath
Shaking
Crying
Helpless
Feel the impact before you hear the blast
When will the body count be high enough?
Isn’t one too many?
How much money will it take to save our children?
When will our politicians stop voting with their wallets?
How many more verses of this godawful song must we sing?
✺
Uvalde’s song slips into the stygian stream
Quit your rowing, jettison the oars
Give up bailing on the rising water
It’s useless if we let this divide chasm
If we don’t stop the darkness
From flooding in
We’re all going down with this ship
|
||||
10. |
night looms blues
02:21
|
|||
11. |
||||
12. |
||||
13. |
||||
14. |
Another Song of Erosion
02:18
|
|||
15. |
||||
16. |
||||
17. |
||||
18. |
||||
19. |
Wash Stop
01:03
|
|||
20. |
||||
21. |
Booksong
04:58
|
|||
22. |
Elegy for J & J
02:41
|
|||
23. |
||||
|
See this poem is specific
You have to know what faders are
How they’re used, what it feels like
To ease them forward, gliding with swells
Swells in volume. I can’t just mute the tracks
Of myself that I don’t like, that don’t fit,
That are beautiful but not right for this session,
This life, this season, this day,
In the DAW I cut and mute, stack and overlap
Focus on dynamics and feel and energy
In life I stumbled around dumbfounded
Either on mute or clipping
Accompanying myself on a failed solo
See this is a specific poem
There are bits of me clipping
The lights blinking yellow at first
Then blipping into red & staying there
And I can’t remedy the feedback
Can’t squelch the piercing wail
With sterilizing compression
Can’t back off the mids or the highs
Lord knows I’m beholden to these lows
& there seems to be nothing gained
From easing back on the gain
I want to tell you I’m drowning
Just with dignity and in a minor key
See? This poem is specific
But I think we all know
The last resort
For squelching the feedback
is pulling the plug.
|
||||
24. |
||||
|
Speak straight, walk crooked,
lie if you have to
but make sure it’s the whole truth
& nothing but the truth
so help you god,
or whatever doesn’t offend you
but still holds you accountable
for the selfish, shameless acts
of isolation, desperation and art
you conjure up and carry out
after a six-pack and a few hits
(or worse, teetotal).
Carry yourself erect
despite your doggedness,
it’s the most fluent, constant middle finger
you can raise to gravity and its minions.
I know you’re tired, I am too.
Shit, even existence burns calories
and energy doesn’t just grow, blossom and fall
like golden and auburn leaves off burdened
existential or cosmological trees.
So make something, any-damn-thing.
Take it from here, there and everywhere in between.
Steal indiscriminately and make it yours.
Slap it together as best you can.
Don’t worry about where it came from
or where you think it’s going.
If you must, think of it
as the maggots in their wounds.
Them. Yes, them. The others,
the can’t-make-can’t-do-can-only-shit-on-you’s.
The ones not capable of turning on their own lights
so they scrape up the backs of gentle giants,
passive savants and you.
The backbiters and bottom feeders,
carrion scavenging on what they could never do,
sure do love to talk and complicate
what’s already laid plain,
easy as you go; I’m simple simonizing
the creative sermon, the battle hymn
of the ever-creating republic
and they still can’t get it.
So, be the bonfire. Be the flat tire.
Be the cat howling in the night,
the creaking screen door that never would shut right.
Be the infuriating squeak in just their left shoe.
Be the damn after every god,
the crack of the whip,
the rainless clouds covering up the midday sun;
Christ, be the laughing cardboard cylinder
after the last of the toilet paper’s gone
because even a little shit
can make a big stink.
|
||||
25. |
Windsong
04:14
|
|||
A.S. Coomer Elizabethtown, Kentucky
Folk. Americana. Narratives. Ambient Instrumentals. Aubades. Nocturnes. Poetry. Rock & roll. Psychedelia. Alt-
Country.
Five of my tunes were published by The Museum of Americana.
Rural Eminence Volumes One, Two, & Three are instrumental reflections of the rural life.
Songs for Leaving is a poetry/music fusion.
I've got tons of projects cooking.
Follow along for more tasty sounds.
... more
A.S. Coomer recommends:
Family Band, y'all.
go to album
Coomers, y'all.
go to albumIf you like A.S. Coomer, you may also like:
I'm You (2019)
by Hallelujah The Hills
The Boston indie rockers return, with their characteristic mix of poignant lyrics and melodies that can turn from delicate to anthemic.
go to album
Outlandish Poetica
by Jonathan Something
An almost anti-blues/anti-rock style that masters classic sounds while mocking the industry’s perceived seriousness.
go to album
The Convincer (20th Anniversary Edition)
by Nick Lowe
Released in 2001, “The Convincer” is a gentle gem in the Nick Lowe catalog; an anniversary edition provides opportunity for rediscovery.
go to album
The Rhythm of the City
by John Paul Keith
Classic roots rock with Memphis grit and swagger from singer-songwriter John Paul Keith, on Wild Honey Records.
go to album
