The High Museum of Art

Lyrics

[Intro]Peachtree Street, October noon.And there you are. A clean, white idea.A ship of porcelain and glass.Moored at the corner of 16th.I walk toward the curve of the wall.[Verse 1]I push through the glass doors and the city sound just… dies.Replaced by the click of my own shoes on the polished stone floor.Up in the great atrium, the light is a physical thing.Richard Meier, you must have dreamed only of light.When you drew this up for 1983.These clerestory windows, drinking the high Georgia sun.And pouring it down, a waterfall on these curved white ramps.[Chorus]Three thousand panels of porcelain-enameled steel.Each one numbered. A jigsaw puzzle for giants.Each one placed by a hand I'll never know.You are a clean white lung on Peachtree.Breathing in the afternoon light, breathing out this impossible quiet.This is the vessel.This is the house built just for looking.[Verse 2]Then Renzo Piano came, twenty-two years later. 2005.Gave you the Wieland Pavilion, the Anne Cox Chambers Wing.A thousand little skylights, like eyes.More room to breathe. More clean walls for the folk art saints and the restless abstracts.More glass to watch the traffic stream north to Buckhead.You just grew.Another white wing to catch the setting sun.[Chorus]Three thousand panels of porcelain-enameled steel.Each one numbered. A jigsaw puzzle for giants.Each one placed by a hand I'll never know.You are a clean white lung on Peachtree.Breathing in the afternoon light, breathing out this impossible quiet.This is the vessel.This is the house built just for looking.[Bridge]And I think of the names not carved in the donor walls.The men who spoke Spanish as they welded the frame and fitted the steel.Their fingerprints under the white enamel.And the guards who walk these halls in the blue dark after midnight.Just them and the hum of the climate control.Protecting the silence. The distance between the frames.Your heart beats slow and steady, after all the doors are locked.[Outro]Back out on the sidewalk.Blinking in the glare.You're still there. Unmoved.A white anchor for the whole Woodruff campus.Holding all that stored-up color.Holding all that captured light.Holding.