Somebody Asked Me Who I Was
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Tuesday, half past six, we'd rewired the county gate
Every road in town runs through it, so I figured it was fate
Knocked on the first door, got "nobody by that name"
And I felt the whole place falling, and I reached for who to blame
Then Danny knocked next door and a voice said "who are you?"
No welcome and no hello, just a lock that held up true
A locked door means the house is standing, someone's home to turn you down
Don't tear up every road, son, for one wrong address in town
Same knock, the same blank answer, every time and right away
Trouble that steady isn't weather, it's what somebody told it to say
There's a hundred shades of no if you'll stand still and hear them through
So we read one sign at one crossroads, and it pointed nowhere true
Pull it all back and you lose what's working too
And you'll fear the wiring next time, every change you mean to do
A good clue ain't the answer, you still walk out and check the sign
But it shrinks the whole dark county down to one crooked line
Then Danny knocked next door and a voice said "who are you?"
No welcome and no hello, just a lock that held up true
A locked door means the house is standing, someone's home to turn you down
Don't tear up every road, son, for one wrong address in town
Somebody asked me who I was
Best news I heard all night
The band
The On-Call
A weathered tenor, close-mic'd with a little rasp, telling it plainly. A specific person, a specific night and a lesson learned the expensive way - warm, and never preachy about it.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post A 401 Is Better News Than It Sounds.
When an infrastructure change seems to break everything, an error that differs between services is evidence that shrinks the problem before you start fixing it.
More by The On-Call
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- Go Ask the Other Gate 4:09
- Stale by Friday 3:16
- Honest Data 4:57