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Odetta's War Lyrics
Sail off, sail into the sun, and let everything that pains be undone
Cast off the fabled leotard, flee the legions of FAKES by the shore
And darkness and hunger are as maddening as the wild-whipping rains,
And they move to the east, and they crawl to the west, they have
No patience for the wind nor its crest.
They said "Cast off, get away from this rock.
I shall live another day and I curse the hell out of this rock.
The Crystalline Cathedral is in the damn-dest spot!"
And turn to the wind like a hawk.
Ideal wave. Ideal blade. Ideal lake that bears the stamp of the sun,
Some owners shall rest when their property sleeps,
but for the wicked that day will never come.
And Dee don't see, that the end of the Sea, is like a needle prophesying
The dawn.
And the enemy shakes, and the enemy weeps: who's going to call off this rain?
They go: "Let us be away from this spot!
This is the blame-taking spot!
This is everybody's got a hole in their heart.
This is everybody's got a darkness in their gut."
And the whole damn battalion's got to run from this spot,
And flee from the black beak of the hawk.
Shitty light over the waves.
[But] When you're rollin' into the country life, they're going
Do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do
Hush hush, you really didn't mean it anyway.
Cast off the fabled leotard, flee the legions of FAKES by the shore
And darkness and hunger are as maddening as the wild-whipping rains,
And they move to the east, and they crawl to the west, they have
No patience for the wind nor its crest.
I shall live another day and I curse the hell out of this rock.
The Crystalline Cathedral is in the damn-dest spot!"
Some owners shall rest when their property sleeps,
but for the wicked that day will never come.
And Dee don't see, that the end of the Sea, is like a needle prophesying
The dawn.
And the enemy shakes, and the enemy weeps: who's going to call off this rain?
This is the blame-taking spot!
This is everybody's got a hole in their heart.
This is everybody's got a darkness in their gut."
And the whole damn battalion's got to run from this spot,
Do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do
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The 'hush hush' part at the end... soooo amazing.
I don't know what the source of these lyrics is, because they are incorrect in a few places ('And they move FROM the East', 'No patience for the WAVE nor its crest', and 'Ideal wave' is never sung) as far as the album version goes. But they are certainly punctuated according to Carey's style, with arbitrarily capitalised words, odd hyphenates, an excess of colons and double quotation marks, and very short sentences which don't make rhetorical sense. But: incredible song, is the point, everything about it. Probably the best on the album, and second only to Bushels in their oeuvre, in my opinion.
The lyrics are copied exactly from the liner notes. It's not uncommon for Carey, or anyone for that matter, to deviate from them slightly recording the cut that makes the album.
The lyrics are copied exactly from the liner notes. It's not uncommon for Carey, or anyone for that matter, to deviate from them slightly recording the cut that makes the album.