The Note That Was Not There (Thelonious Monk)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You wore the hat
because the hat
was the answer
to a question
the room
had been asking you
your whole life
and you were tired
of explaining
the answer
in any other form,
so you sat down
at an upright
in Hackensack
on a Friday
in October
and the engineer
in the booth
asked if you wanted
to warm up
and you said
*I am warm*
and you played
the first chord
and the engineer
forgot
he was an engineer.

[Verse 2]
The chord
had a note in it
that nobody
in the history
of the piano
had been told
went there,
and the chord
had a note missing
that everybody
in the history
of the piano
had been told
had to be there,
and the room
went very quiet
in the half-second
between
the wrong note
arriving
and the right note
not arriving,
and the half-second
was where
you lived.

[Chorus]
The note that was not there
was the song.
The note that was not there
was the part of the music
the audience
had been bringing
to the room
all along
and you were
the first piano player
who refused
to take it from them.

The note that was not there
was the chair
you pulled out
and waited
for them
to sit down in.

[Verse 3]
The young drummer
on the date
had no idea
what you were doing
and you did not explain
because the doing
was the lesson
and three years later
the young drummer
was the most original drummer
in New York
and credited
the lessons
to the man in the hat
who never gave him
a single one.

[Outro]
You stopped playing
in seventy-three
and the room
called it a tragedy.
It was not the tragedy.
The piano had said
what you needed it to say
and the room
had finally
heard the note
that was not there
and there was no reason
to play
the same chord twice
just because
the room
had only just
caught up.

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