The Weakerthans- Pamphleteer (with lyrics)

I'm standing on this corner.
Can't get their attention.
Facing rush hour faces turned around.
I clutch my stack of paper, press one to a chest,
then watch it swoop and stutter to the ground.
I'm weary with right-angles, abbreviated daylight,
and waiting for a winter to be done.
Why do I still see you in every mirrored window,
in all that I could never overcome?
How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you.
How you don't know where you should look, so you look at my hands.
How movements rise and then dissolve, melted by our shallow breath.
How causes dance away from me.
I am your pamphleteer.
I walk this room in time to the beat of the Gestetner,
contemplate my next communique.
The rhetoric and treason of saying that I'll miss you.
Of saying "Hey, well maybe you should stay."
Sing "Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one"
like me remembering the way it could have been.
Help me with this barricade.
No surrender. No defeat.
A spectre's haunting Albert Street.
I am your pamphleteer.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Weakerthans
• Pamphleteer
• lyrics
• Left
• and
• Leaving

[shmike1984]

"it started off as purely fiction. A friend of mine wrote a film script and asked me to write a song for it. It was a script about various things, and it had a newspaper story to it. But I suddenly had this image of an activist, someone involved in politics, who passed out pamphlets on street corners and suddenly one day cracked and started churning out these pamphlets about his personal life."

[peuimporte]

Beautiful writing, I'm still amazed how he managed to mingle political and sentimental, get away with it and ...

Thanks Shmike for the behind the scene comment.

[TFOTfan36]

@Nightmary83

Thanks for the info, that's really cool!

[Nightmary83]

@TFOTfan36

"What force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong". It's a lyric from "Solidarity Forever" from The Little Red Songbook. It's taking a popular catchphrase from the radical left and applying it to his personal life.

[EamonJgod]

@shmike1984 I read this too, had to look up what this was all about. Great concept.

[reteipdevries]

what a great song.

[TFOTfan36]

"Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one" The Weakerthans, am I seeing a connection here?

[cbandmw]

this song makes me cry. i love it.

[ChewyDaDon]

@shmike1984 No way it was purely that, he was in Propagandhi, and they are all very political. He was probably a pamphleteer at least once in his life and noticed how people ignore you so often...

[clcsqueejy04]

favorite band.

and rightfully so.

[PunksInVegas]

Everything about this song is beautiful, from the guitar work and amazing lyrics.