Not the Same as Done
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
Cash left the drawer at closing time
Nobody signed, nobody asked why
The ledger smiled and called it clean
A question dressed up like it's routine
The city runs on lights that just turn green
No hand on the switch that anyone's seen
Someone made that call a long time back
And left it running down an empty track
It moved, it moved, but nobody chose
Open don't look like closed
Keep the signal live, keep it red
Don't let the silence stand in for the dead
Six months gone and the books look fine
Until you ask who drew the line
A default's a choice somebody made
Then walked away before the debt was paid
It moved, it moved, but nobody chose
Open don't look like closed
Keep the signal live, keep it red
Don't let the silence stand in for the dead
It moved, it moved, but nobody chose
Open don't look like closed
Keep the signal live, keep it red
Don't let the silence stand in for the dead
Still open
Still open
Say it before it's done
The band
Cold Start
Cool, distant, heavily reverbed vocals over neon-noir synths. Systems rendered as cities at night: sparse lines, a lot of space, and a chorus that repeats like a signal.
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 Undecided Is Not The Same As Resolved.
When software takes a default action on a judgment call nobody has actually made, the fix is to keep that decision visibly open rather than let the default pass as an answer.
More by Cold Start
- Same Wire 4:33
- Fifteen Minutes Before 3:45
- Every Light Has a Name 4:47
- Small Enough to Ship 3:38