Nothing Saved Yet
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
She opened up the app on a Tuesday, half past nine
New phone in her pocket, not a thing of hers inside
The screen went red before the chart could even load
Said "something's gone wrong," down a perfectly good road
A second later, there it was, all filled in, clean and bright
The app had shouted first and then apologised for the fright
She shrugged and swiped it off like she'd done a hundred times
So when the real one came, she never read the lines
Nothing here yet ain't an error, friend
It's just an empty drawer, not the bitter end
Say it soft, say it true, say only what you know
So when you raise your voice, folks believe it's so
I walked down the hall to the screens next door
They'd all learned this one long before
The knowing was there, it just never got passed on
So make the right way the easy one
Nothing here yet ain't an error, friend
It's just an empty drawer, not the bitter end
Say it soft, say it true, say only what you know
So when you raise your voice, folks believe it's so
Hush now, let the fetch come through
Hush now, let the fetch come through
Welcome, you're new
Nothing here yet, and that's all right
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 Nothing Here Yet Is Not An Error.
When an app reads from a local copy first, an empty answer is a normal state, and treating it as a failure teaches users to ignore the errors that matter.
More by The On-Call
- The Free Lane 3:45
- Polite Till Friday 3:29
- A Fever's Just a Fever 3:42
- Something New to Try 3:03