Microphones In 2020 chords by The Microphones

Tuning: Standard (E A D G B E)





Instrumental intro:

F#m     Dmaj7 D (alternate between these two throughout the song; I will exclude Dmaj7 from here on out
for the sake of simplicity)

Verse:
C#m   D
The true state of all things
D
I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising
D                   F#m
I remember my life as if it's just some dreams that I don't trust
F#m
Burning off, layered thick
F#m
A cargo that I haul
F#m
Wounds and loves unresolved
C#m  D
I wake up with the sun in my eyes
D

The present moment tries
                    F#m
But now I'm back where I was when I was 20
F#m
Crashing through salal alone and mumbling
F#m
One moment thinking I'm wise
F#m
And in the next one I writhe
               D
Trying to re-remind myself of something learned then forgotten
D
Countless sunrises burying the things
D
I'd figured out the day before
D
Like that I probably won't find shelter
D
In the arms of any other person
F#m
Though I will try
F#m
Again I'll deny
F#m
The blanketing sky
F#m
The thing I just realised
F#m
For probably the millionth time
F#m
That walking with my knees trembling
C#m     D
Is the true state of all things

D
The true state of all things is a waterfall
D
With no bottom crashing end
D
And no ledge to plummet off
    F#m
Full of debris and flowers, never not falling
F#m
And in it we swim and fall
F#m
Sometimes beside, often apart
F#m
It's just chaos heaving
C#m  D
I wake up with the sun in my eyes
D
Beneath present moment skies
D
Squinting and wondering how I got here

Going through the contents of my backpack
F#m
Shaking out the dust to bring some empty space back
F#m
Filling a long merch table with artifacts
F#m
Looking back to see if I could draw a map
       C#m
That leads to now

 D
I remember where I was

D
When I was 20, or 17
D
Or 23
D
The disinterested sun would still rise every morning
D
Same as now
D
Dawn was loud
     F#m
I took my breakfast to the couch on the porch of the punk house
F#m
Coffee and low tide smell and my life stretching out
F#m
Spending hours each morning reading poems and staring off
F#m
And then snapping back to urgency
                 C#m
I did my dishes and then I would sprint
    D
To the studio again
D
Spend all day and night digging in
D
Distorted bass, spliced tape
D
Singing lines like: "There's no end"
D
And "I won't look for you in my room"
D
About my friends

     F#m
I checked themicrophones@hotmail(dot)com like once a week
F#m
I would drive out to the ocean and not tell anybody
F#m
I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in a dollar theatre in Aberdeen
F#m
It was a rainy matinée, 2001, Sunday, March 18th
      C#m
And in the parking lot afterward
     D
For a few minutes in the rain
D
I stood glowing with ideas
D
Of what I might try to convey with this music
D
At that moment, my mind flashing like a blade
 F#m
A 22 year old in flip flops running around in an empty mall parking lot
F#m
Lost in a martial arts fantasy
F#m
It looks ridiculous now
           C#m
But the truth is that alone there
D
Something was formed
D
The way they held themselves upright with tea in the opening scenes
D
A warm formality, spines straight and feet planted wide
D
Untipoverable like the bamboo'd undulating hills
    F#m
Walking slowly, making eye contact and gliding
F#m
The sound of empty wind when they sword fought weightless in the bamboo
F#m
With a purity of heart that transcends gravity
F#m
Leaping off the mountain into ambiguity
    C#m
Falling slow
    D
As the end credits rolled
D
I decided I would try to make music that contained this deeper peace
D
Buried underneath distorted bass
D
Fog imbued with light and emptiness
F#m
I kept on driving out to the ocean
F#m
It was raining so hard, I was wet wool caked with sand
F#m
I watched the dunes migrate slowly

 C#m D     F#m
Instrumental:

F#m
Lost mind in the tall grass
        C#m
And slowly the sound
  D
Of roaring waves returned

I rose

I returned to my station wagon with a wet face

Extravagant solitude invigorates

I drove back to Olympia clear headed

Temporarily
     F#m
And went back into the studio to resume whatever this thing is

This spooling out repetitive decades long song string

This river coursing through my life

These wild swipes at meaning

And now I circle back to look into the spring

      C#m
When I was 17
    D
It was 1995

I put the name "Microphones" on the tapes I would make late at night after work at the record store

I was already by then a couple years deep into this weird pursuit
                           F#m
Playing drums, copying lyrics out to hang them in my room

Until I started making my own embarrassing early tries

At this thing that sings at night above the house

Branches in the wind
    C#m
Bending wordlessly
      D
I wanted to capture it on tape


At first I called my recordings a different name

I called it "The Microphones" on the third cassette I made

Because I loved recording and the equipment seemed to be living
            F#m
And it sang to me like static interference

From the small AM radio station down the street

Night in Anacortes in the mid-90s, oil tankers rumbling

I stayed late recording every night

Then I drove back to my parents house

My headlights through the trees along Heart Lake Road

Winding down the dark slope

    C#m
Beneath Mount Erie
   D
I was already who I am


A bottle of India ink, masking tape

Julie Doiron, Tori Amos, Cranberries, Sinéad O'Connor

Eric's Trip, Red House Painters, Sonic Youth, This Mortal Coil
F#m
Kurt Cobain had died

I had my driver's license and a girlfriend

And we'd cling to each other and dream that anything's permanent

Even back then

The beast of uninvited change

Insisted itself in

And look here, it still hangs
        C#m
But when I was young (Young)
    D
I'd go driving in the rain

   F#m
I saw Stereolab in Bellingham and they played one chord for fifteen minutes

Something in me shifted

I brought back home belief I could create eternity

Leaning the guitar up on the amp, taping down organ keys

Feeding back forever distorted waves of cymbals oceany

Slowly starting to try the move the words beyond
   C#m
Mere melancholy
   D
Into something that rings

True and old and useful hopefully

But when I was 17 I sang

In the moment hurt romantically

Grasping in the dark

    F#m
Like: "Shadows of the moon..."

"On the back of the car seat..."

"Where she sat once"

             C#m         D
It's not that bad, but I know I wanted to go deeper beneath pain

Beneath the human


Is it because my parents barely had any money

And preferred to leave the baby in the garden

That I grew up to blur the boundary
                    F#m
Between myself and the actual churning dirt of this place?

That it feels normal to me to speak with the voice of weather

To build and move into a mirage

Made of songs cascading down a rock face in a homemade myth?


Even deeper back into the mist
      C#m
When I was 12 or 13
      D
On a family trip we hiked down a steep bluff to an ocean beach in whipping rain

My little brother's clothes got wet from playing in the winter waves

My parents made a fire of smokey driftwood and we huddled in
  F#m
And took his wet clothes off and held him naked above the flames

Smelling like smoke and salt on the drive home
                C#m
Surely this experience explains something
   D
About whoever it was that sang all these songs


When you're younger every single things vibrates with significance

Gazing at the details in the artwork of a 7 inch

Devouring every word in a zine

There was barely internet
F#m
Meaning gets attributed wherever appetite bestows a thing

With resonating glowing ringing out through a life

What from these times do I carry with me still?

The things I survive return repeatedly
           C#m  D
And I find again that I am a newborn every time

D   F#m D
When I wake alone in the dark
Gsus2  D
Again, I swim
D  F#m   D
Out into the lake of the heart
Gsus2  D
And in

D   F#m  D  Gsus2  D
Mm...

D   F#m  D  Gsus2  D  (2x)
Instrumental:

D
When I got back to Olympia from the ocean

I woke up early before dawn to start recording

The things I wanted to communicate had to do

With finding out how to break out from seeing

Only the inside of reflected ocean on the sky

F#m
It was early 2001 and I was almost 23

I'd finished recording The Glow Pt. 2

And I was always on tour or setting up a tour

Always running, voracious, thirsty

I'd go out to the lake with friends

Swim out to the middle and dive as far as I could
C#m        D
Down to where the water gets cold, with open eyes

We'd go up on the roof at night and actually contemplate the moon

My friends and I just trying to blow each others' minds

Just lying there gazing, young and ridiculous

And we meant it, our eyes watering
F#m
The moon without abstraction

Then became a floating ball of a rock in outer space

Not a sticker or a light or a hole through black paper

We were making food and records and paintings
                 C#m
And walking around beneath a real infinity
 D
I felt my size


That brief dissipating shock of looking into outer space

And seeing for just a second the bottomless distance pressed against my face

My little mind trying to write it down, zooming out

A faint yelp lost in a thunderstorm
F#m
Sufficiently small, thinking on the geologic scale

Making the voice of mountains


Reaching beyond my old concerns
        C#m  D
From when I was 17 in 1995
    C#m
All the layers of life
      D
Glint in my flashing eye
C#m
Simultaneously
      D
And at any moment we could die
      C#m
And so with urgency
     D
I keep a candle by my side
       C#m
And watch it disappear and glow
    D
At the same time

D
The weather moves across the land and doesn't have a reason

This rippling uncertainty beneath our bones
  C#m
Is still
     D
The true state of all things


It was at a truck stop in northern Italy

I was on tour playing drums and always wandering off alone

Squinting into the setting sun

My notebook filling
F#m
I was touring, living on an alternate plane within

But set apart from this life

Where people wake and work and don't self-uproot each day

Instead we passed through the towns like criminals

I was so gladly included in this rare world

This moving cult of groundlessness

Roomless, moving, awake
      C#m     D
Across that parking lot, recognition of the same

D
Another touring American band

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

All dressed in matching track suits and sunglasses

Grizzled and silly

A kind of Italian tour costume

Blending in but not really

And their playfulness with persona

Liberated me with permeability
      F#m
I thought, "Who is it even that sings

And who comes to life

Between the ears of the hearers in the rooms at night

And how can we all get deep?"

F#m
The packaging distracts from the nourishment it wraps

Fixation on the singer's face or on the band's name
     C#m            D
Keeps us groveling and blind at the edge of a sea
D
Unsubmerged in the singing waterfall

Looking for a door into The Mansion

Taking this weird art project out into public

       F#m
Indulging in cultivated ambiguity

About participants' identities

Letting misperceptions hang

Because nothing's really true

With this imagined collective called "The Microphones"

I wrote about climbing up and dying

And then flying off as vultures

And a universe beyond
        C#m
Innocent of the real air of death
   D
That awaited down the path

D                  F#m
At the very end of 2002, I took the Microphones name and crumpled it up
  D
And burned it in a cave on the frozen edge of northern Norway
     F#m
I made a boundary between two eras of my life

A feeble gesture at making chaos seem organized

The roaring river carves on, laughing at my efforts

While the idea of something called "Mount Eerie" engulfed me
  C#m
And time
D
Refuses to stop

D
Many, many years later

I heard "Freezing Moon" by Mayhem

And these words jumped out:
 D
"The cemetery lights up again"

"Eternity opens"

And I say:
 D
"Nothing stays the same

No one knows anything

Someone else lives in the house I used to live in
  C#m       D
And soon it will be torn down or burn"

And who would even want to live in a prolonged stagnation?

I am older now and I no longer feel the same way

That I did even five seconds ago

Watch me thrash around
      F#m
And try to gracefully allow the past to hang

Like: "no big deal"


Bands that break up and then reunite for money can do whatever they want

But it makes me glad that I am only this one contrary grump, impossible to reunite
C#m
Live
  D
The present moment burns

D
I will never stop singing this song

It goes on forever

I started when I was a kid and I still want to hold it lightly

This luxurious privilege to sit around
                F#m
Frowning and wondering what it means

Playing with words

And trying to prove that names mean nothing

F#m
A finger

Pointed at the moon

Mistaken

For something shining and true

F#m
I never used to think I'd still be sitting here at 41
C#m        D
Trying to breathe calmly through the waves

But nothing's really changed in this effort that never ends

D                F#m
When I took my shirt off in the yard

I meant it, and it's still off

I'm still standing in the weather

Looking for meaning in the giant meaningless

Days of love and loss repeatedly waterfalling down

    C#m
And the sun
   D      D
Relentlessly rises still


It seems like I'll never not lose wisdom

Constantly relearning all the basics

Never recognizing any faces
F#m
Crawling out from under living layers

Squinting in the light of the earth bathing

Shaking off the weight of expectations

Plus all this nostalgia is embarrassing
   C#m  D
So I walk into an unknown room

Without a name

D
So what if I label this song "Microphones in 2020"?

I hope the absurdity that permeates everything joyfully
F#m
Rushes out and floods the room like water from the ceiling

Undermining all of our delicate stabilities

Admitting that each moment is a new collapsing building

Nothing is true
     C#m    D
But this trembling, laughing in the wind

D
Anyway, every song I've ever sung is about the same thing:
F#m
Standing on the ground looking around, basically

And if there have to be words, they could just be:

"Now only"

And
      C#m
"There's no end"