참세상

deep dish

written by ani difranco
ani difranco, [little plastic castle] (1998) 수록

cold and drizzly night in chicago's deep dish.
fluorescent light of the bathroom shows my hands as they are.
see an eyelash on my cheek.
pick it off and make a wish and walk back out into the bar.
wind at the windows, neon lights the patterned pane.
the waitress wields the weight of her tray around her palm.
the doorman cups his hands and lights his cigarette again
and the rain marches on.
this is only a possibility in a world of possibilities.
there are obviously, there are many possibilities
ranging from small to large.
before long there will be short, before short there was nothing,
when there was nothing
there was always the possibility of something becoming what it is.
don't even bother trying to say something clever.
clever is as clever does no matter what it says.
i'm looking for a sign, says you're real this time.
but i don't trust what's in your head.
i walk up to the bar and point to the top shelf
and then i throw my head back and laugh at myself.
i raise a toast to all our saviors each so badly behaved.
it's too bad that their world is the one that they saved.
there's a spider spinning cobwebs from your elbow to the table
while my eyes ride the crowd in a secret rodeo.
i smile with my mouth, lift my watch up to the light,
say oh, look i have to go.
now you get to dance with me,
now is when it's gotta be
'cuz i can't wait for the dance floor to fill in.
if you want to dance with me, i'll show you how it's gonna be,
'cuz i can't wait for the band to begin.


ani's explanation : "the verses are just descriptive passages, it's a narrative, the scene in the bar. i just describe this scene in detail, there's no "he said/she said" or "the moral of this song is..." for the choruses, i set up a mic in the bathroom at the congress house and i started rolling an adat [tape]. i recorded the bathroom all day. and i told everyone in the studio i was doing it. and various people would go in and piss, and start talking. mark [hallman, owner of congress house] would go in there and talk about whatever was on his mind. there are some amazing recordings from this bathroom! for the first chorus, i chose a selection of what was recorded in the bathroom over the course of the day, this little bit of what mark said; it's not scripted at all, it's like a perilous journey through mark's thought process as he's sitting on the can. and the second chorus was originally just a recording of him pissing, or somebody pissing, over the song. but there was something people found just a little too graphic, i thought maybe i'd gone too far. because the second chorus, it's like you're there, you can just hear it dribbling out in little spurts, throughout the whole chorus of the song. so i thought, okay, we'll take the piss chorus out, but we'll leave the pontifications of mark hallman in." other notes : this song is about a night ani spent with dan bern in chicago.