Say It All The Way Out

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a street: vans, shopfronts, a hundred names going past)
Walk down a high street. Read the signs. They're all people.

[Verse 1]
Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn are on a van outside.
Stockwell sold the tea. Riegel lived in Bonn.
The Loughead brothers changed their letters so we'd say it right,
and Maksymilian's whole name got trimmed by a tired clerk.
Karl and Theo fell out over cigarettes, and split a country.
Louis clocked in, every morning, under his own name.

[Chorus]
Say it all the way out.
It costs you nothing and it takes a second longer.
Say the whole of it — the surnames and the towns,
the brothers, and the daughters, and the ones who died at thirty-two.
Say it all the way out. They were people.
Every single one of these was somebody's whole life.

[Verse 2]
Mercédès was ten and got the grandest badge of all
and died with nothing in a flat in Vienna at thirty-nine.
Charles had the name two years before the tailplane went.
John and Horace lasted eleven months apart.
And Bibendum, who was never anything but tyres,
is the only one of them who only ever grew.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
Three records. Three directions. One trade, run three ways:
the ones who lost their names, the ones who were never real,
and these — the ones still said out loud a million times a day
by people who have no idea they're naming anybody.
That's not forgetting. Forgetting needs a memory first.
That's something quieter. That's being worn smooth by use.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the street, still going)
Dalsey. Hillblom. Lynn.
Stockwell. Riegel. Loughead. Faktorowicz.
Albrecht. Chevrolet. Jellinek. Rolls. Dodge. Hassenfeld.
Say them all the way out.