Say My True Name

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a name said very quietly, twice, in an empty room)
Onomastics. The study of names. It is older than most religion.

[Verse 1]
Every culture that has ever been has the same idea about this:
that a name is not a label, that a name is a HANDLE,
that to know the true one is to have a grip on the thing,
which is why gods hide theirs, and why demons must be asked,
and why in half the stories on this earth the whole plot turns
on somebody finding out what somebody else is called.

[Chorus]
Say my true name. Go on. Say the one nobody uses.
Not the one on the card. Not the one they call me at work.
The one my mother used when I was small and in trouble,
the one only three living people are still allowed to say.
Say my true name. And now you have a grip on me.
Somebody studies this. There is a whole field. Of course there is.

[Verse 2]
And it isn't mystical, is the funny part — it's demographic.
They can date you within five years from your first name alone.
They can find a family's migration in the surnames of a graveyard,
and the moment a community stopped naming sons for grandfathers,
which is the moment something broke, or something was allowed.
A name is a small fossil of what everyone believed that year.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There are people who study only NICKNAMES. That's the whole field.
There are people who study only the names of racehorses, or storms,
or the names we give to things we're frightened of, to make them smaller.
And there is a reason we do not name the animals we intend to eat,
and there is a reason the first thing you do with a baby is name it,
and both of those reasons are the same reason.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the name again, once)
Careful with that.
You're holding it now.