Peachtree Center — In Station

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
A hundred and twenty feet under Peachtree Street
they cut a room from the living rock to meet —
gneiss and quartz and a billion years of stone,
the deepest hold in the system, and I made it my own.

Not the iron veins of 1837 —
this is the gneiss the railroad never touched,
carved for a different kind of rolling
through the bedrock the city never rushed.

[Chorus]
Peachtree Center — down in the rock,
the bedrock cathedral where the trains all dock;
ride the longest stair in all the South
from the dark of the Earth to the daylight's mouth.

[Verse 2]
They didn't tile me over — they let the rock show,
the oldest thing in Atlanta, far below;
every commuter's a spelunker here,
in the cave they carved for the engineer.

The Terminus laid iron in the clay —
I'm cut from something older still, down where
the city's whole foundation holds the weight
of everything that rolls above the air.

[Bridge — the ascent, harmonica enters, the roll builds]
Two hundred feet of escalator climb,
the harmonica rises with you out of the dark —
out of the gneiss and into the downtown shine,
roll, roll, roll out of the rock and into the spark.

You step on a miner and you step off new;
the mountain let the subway through.

[Outro — daylight, harmonica fading up to the street]
…up the long stair… up the long stair…
out of the rock… and the city just rolls…