A Song You Didn't Put On

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a radio between stations, resolving briefly into music, then gone)
It's a full arrangement. That's what's strange.

[Verse 1]
Not a fragment. Not a phrase stuck in your head from the shop.
A whole band, in a room, with a mix — bass on the left,
brushes, a horn line, a singer with a specific voice,
performing something you have absolutely never heard.
And you are not composing it. It is arriving finished.
You are the audience. You are just in the room.

[Chorus]
A song you didn't put on. Playing in the dark.
Better produced than anything you could actually make —
and the second you notice you're enjoying it, it stops,
and it does not resume, and you cannot get it back.
A song you didn't put on. You've lost it already.
You lost it in the noticing. That's the price of the ticket.

[Verse 2]
People have chased this. Composers have chased this for years.
Kept paper by the bed to catch the ones that came,
and mostly what they wrote down in the morning was a mess —
four bars that don't connect and a lyric about a door.
The good ones don't survive the trip. They can't be carried.
They only exist in a room with nobody awake in it.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And I think that's alright, actually. I've made peace with that.
Somewhere behind the ordinary business of your evening
there is an orchestra that only plays when no one's listening,
and shuts down completely the moment you attend to it,
and has been doing this your whole life, most nights, for free.
You have heard hundreds of them. You remember none.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the radio drifts off the station)
That was a good one.
That one was really good.