Featured on: Alphabet City Cycle, My Lifelong Love, The Secret of Happiness
Collaborator: Marcy Heisler (lyrics)
Song Type: art song, song cycle with violin, soprano
Associated Artists: Kate Baldwin, Susan Egan, Diana Rose Becker, Julie Garnye
(The Student on Avenue B)
LYRICS:
I’m walking in my head down Avenue B
As the echo of a guitar strums
Tightening my overcoat
And waiting for contentment
Like a bus that never comes
Crushing my hat over angry hair
I beg my pocket for a cigarette
And instead I find a nickel
And a crumpled little napkin
With a poem for a lover I need to forget…
The wanting of you
It colors everything I do
It’s in my house and in my bed
It’s there in every tear I shed
When I don’t think I’ll make it through
The wanting of you
It is my unsurrendered prayer
I trace your hands upon my skin
How did I dare to let you in
It’s almost more than I can bear
The wanting of you
I patronize myself as I take my chair
In the couldn’t care less café
Accept the silent greeting of the mother with the baby
And the model with the black shar pei
There’s a NYU kid who raises one lid
Then goes back to his thousand page book…
And I spend another morning tracing stories in the oatmeal
That some Spanish guy did not remember to cook…
The wanting of you
It wakes me up at half past two
With long gone shadows I converse
I think it can’t get any worse
But how I know that isn’t true
The wanting of you
It is a never ending storm
I wear it everywhere I go
Just like a coat that doesn’t know
That it’s supposed to keep me warm.
You…
Knocking on my door, stumbling over words
Laughing at my jokes, losing wallets
You,
Never getting mad, sort of getting mad, never understanding
Understanding everything
You
Absolutely right
Absolutely wrong
Everything that matters…
Nothing but a song
Nothing but a song
I step into the bath round a quarter past three
Let the water ease my wounded pride
I wash away my sorrow with a promise of tomorrow
But the water doesn’t let me hide…
The clock on the wall says go ahead stall
You’re entitled to a way to cope…
And I wonder if it isn’t really lonliness that kills you
I think people really die of hope
of hope
The wanting of you
It colors everything I do
It’s in my house and in my bed
It’s there in every tear I shed
When I don’t think I’ll make it through
The wanting of you
It is my unsurrendered prayer
I trace your hands upon my skin
How did I dare to let you in
It’s almost more than I can bear
The wanting of you.
