Small Talk

by Sister City

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1.
04:04
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2.
03:16
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03:30
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4.
02:35
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5.
03:11
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03:05
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9.
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about

Okay folks! Sister City - Small Talk is now yours. Please treat it with love and care. It is our absolute pleasure to share these songs with you.

Perhaps you'd like to give us some money for this here album. Let's see if we can entice you. There are these different tiers, see? And you get cool things for each. Every $5 you spend entitles you to one more of the things.

$5 tier (pick one):
-Set of 13 of Adam's original acoustic demos (featuring some songs not on the album) for Small Talk
-Set of 9 full band demos for Small Talk
-Set of 5 random acoustic demos from the next Sister City album

$10 tier (pick one of the $5 tier as well):
-Adam will handwrite the lyrics of a song of your choosing and also write you a letter in which he tries to make small talk.

$25 tier (includes all 3 of the $5 tier or the letter):
-Adam will record an acoustic cover of a song of your choosing. Be reasonable.

$50 tier (Includes everything from $5 tier + letter):
-Adam will write you a song about a subject of your choosing. He's done it for people before and they were happy with it.
-ALSO! Daniel will film a drum cover of a song of your choosing. Be reasonable-ish.

credits

released 09 April 2013
Recorded December 2011-October 2012 in Philadelphia, PA and Rockville, MD
Sister City is Daniel Abzug (Drums) and Adam Linder (Everything Else)
Engineered by Adam Linder. Acoustic guitars engineered by Michael Cantin
Produced by Sister City
Mixed by Adam Linder
Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper at Turtle Tone Studios
Artwork and layout by J.J. Hameister.
Photo of baby found by Greg Burton
All song lyrics and music by Adam Linder

tags

tags: indie punk rock indie rock philadelphia punk punk rock sister city small talk Philadelphia

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about

If you enjoy Sister City, you’re probably struggling to reconcile a few things. Maybe you like indie rock, but your beard is lackluster. Singer Adam Linder’s beard and mustache do not connect. Maybe you love punk music but struggle with how to integrate it into your real life. Singer Adam Linder once wore a Rancid shirt under his dress clothes to a Bar Mitzvah. ... more

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Track Name: Small Talk
I could have the smarts to tear apart a kid like Solomon
But I'll die as soon as the next guy cause I don't take my vitamins
I concede
It's just like me
To dislike everything

My stomach's hurt cause I've been hungry but I've never been starving
And this is one of maybe three things I've ever put my heart in
I believe
That it's obscene
For a wretch like me to prance and preen

So here's to long and lost lives, long lines, lost time and being left behind
There's only a couple things I've ever said I truly wish I hadn't
As I run my pre-arthritic fingers through the hair I still have on my head
I sometimes wonder which machine inside of me will be the first to break

Indulging each indignity's inspiring defeat
My tail triumphantly between my legs, in luck and luxury
Which I will shed
Gradually
Like baby teeth, these things that I no longer need

And here's to jaded, overstated lessons for a completely different time
There is only so much that anyone can realize
As I stick my nose in generations old dejected garbage
I will try to smell the rose that grows out of the wreckage

There is hope for me
Because I don't have real problems
And I'll die one day
From a list of gifts genetically
I have come to terms
With the wood and nails and earth and worms
My attention full
Looking for a miracle

So stop me if the choir starts to practice what I preach
I forgive almost everyone for almost everything
I'm talking small, my tongue unthawed from pure misanthropy
For I am patient, making changes to a new philosophy
Track Name: Today Was My Day to Die and You Ruined It
Faux fittingly I am forging ahead
Never better than
The last half-hearted heroic attempt
To stop the spread
The stench of sentience or any semblance
Every sentence as penance

I treat each symbol like a symptom
Of an overbearing trust
Buzzed because I always listen
And I care far too much

In the fight between substance and superficiality
I will ignore the referee
I will invite my enemies
To take shots at me
To lend credibility
To my oh-so-wounded delivery

I made a mess out of my memory
But found a future of my own
With each obscene release, I rinse, repeat
And ramble till I'm home

Cause I'm as deftly deaf as ever
And stuck in skin I've seen grow old
So if today's the day, fuck bold and brave
The fight's left from my throat

I hit a wall
I had to crawl back
And reassess each penny spent
In spite of former confidence
But when I taught myself to walk again
I respectfully declined the chance
And planted myself stubbornly instead

And I stared at the ground
And I found myself imagining
That it meant something profound
So I made meaning out of everything I found

And silently
I will inspire amnesty
I will accept morality
And then engender empathy and consistency
To lend clarity
To my oh-so-important biology
Track Name: Horsey!
With enough luck I could erase all I've worked for
Not luck but skill, come to think of it that's more
Like my tendencies
My past proclivity
Towards tripping over my own two feet
Not tripping, but stepping deliberately
Until my face is flush with the ground
I crack a smile on the way down

Some nights are a noose and a step stool
But I can barely tie my shoes
When I was young I joined a boy scout troop for a week or two
But decided Nintendo was more my excuse
Did you catch that misdirection?
Do you hear this introspection?
Am I just the sum of what I haven't done?

The horse I rode in on, he died
But I'll beat him alive
I will try I will try

With enough luck I could erase all I've worked for
Not luck but skill, come to think of it that's more
Like my tendencies
My past proclivity
Towards tripping over my own two feet
Not tripping, but stepping deliberately
Until my face is flush with the ground
I crack a smile on the way down

Some days I'm a parking spot away
From convulsing into fits of rage
And the forecast gets the final say
If fresh air will get an attempt at my face
Did you think it's worth a mention
That my only real intention's
Not to stick to the bottom
Or broaden or blossom
But breathe the belief that it's really this bleak

And I fear this fight is fruitless
That my errant ideology
That ever-present potency
That pallid personality
May one day come to define me

We've all become miserable people
Track Name: Every Stone
I actually don't have anything to say today

I am alone
Taking responsibility
On bedsheets freshly pressed
And carpets cleaned

I'm on a globe
Most of which I will never see
Oh poor insignificant me

Ever since I learned to swim
I've been furiously paddling
I lost a little skin
But I think everybody did

I am a veteran of insignificance
An old man bathed in bitterness
If I lose all my friends
It's because I thought I was better off

I've contrarily weighed in
For so long now I forget the reasons
My treasure's turned to trash
But I think everybody's has

There was a light shone bright on a liar
Decidedly guilty but citing a logic
Contrary to science
We must love that man despite it

There was a sign held high in the sky for
several hours
Distributing light indiscriminately
Undeservedly, to all inviting
I didn't get dressed all day to spite it

I actually don't have anything to say today
I actually don't have anything
Track Name: Psalm 26
This is how I've been
Still looking for connections
This is how I live
Synthetic misdirection
This is how I've been
Still looking for connections
This is how I live

Reverse engineering prophecy
Taping wires to my shirtsleeves
Cut my finger adding new keys
Next to my savings card for groceries

Making sound to quell the crowds
Talking loud and breaking down
Finding my head in the clouds
Finding my head in the ground

Offering my burnt skin
To the man in my reflection
Convince myself my pigments
Are little more than fictions

I tell to stop the swell
I yell to break the spell
Myself, my god, my wealth
Myself and my declining health

This is how I've been
Still riddled with compulsions
This is how I live
With mostly good intentions
This is how I've been
In a self-fulfilling sequence
This is how I live

Douse myself in details
The atomic weight of skin cells
The speed at which my voice tells my hands they need to slow down
Or I'll shake out all the sickness
I've admitted keeps me honest
The secret symbiosis of successful coexistence

This is how I've been
Track Name: Kin
Esteemed members of society
Us little boys and girls
We should really learn to not be so ashamed
Of our store brand sleeping aids
Half-jokingly explained away
"Better safe than sorry, just in case"

And from the ashes of divorces
Names of friends both cursed and praised
And if the former more than latter
Let us wait another day
And on the backs of westward horses
Not as ancient as we'd make
Our blood but not quite family implores
"Take us away"

These syllables I speak sneak
Past anxiety and chewed-up cheeks
And climb and reach a peak past which
I can't help but repeat:

"The things you rank as sacrosanct
Are often just wet paper bags
Sustaining through the facts
By subsisting on the snags"

But take the sweat stains on our shirts
As proof at least our bodies work
And see the seams that line our jeans
But don't get caught up in their worth
And on the backs of westward horses
Not as ancient as we'd make
Our blood but not quite family implores
"Take us away
Track Name: Room 222
I've got nothing to hide
Save for the space between my two vacant eyes
Cause you can't well let every sick thing slip
From the space between your two cracked lips
Too soon to know, too far to go
Two hours like this and I've dissected
Every step I've taken, every second
I am ashamed and only just awake

I fill my days with emptiness
And it gets so dense
Too hard to parse
The shrinking space between
Self-defense and entitlement

I fill my nights with alibis
Giant tar-black lies
In some failed attempt to vent
Or supplement my imagined indifference
Intensely insistent

So give it up for giving in
For stubbing toes on stones you've thrown
It's everyone's fault but your own
And owning up to only what
You can't explain away
With shrugs or waves or little phrases
Predicted phases or fronts

Change is a four letter word
But numbers were never my strong suit
Success is a ten dollar term
But money's not something I could ever hold on to
Change is a four letter word
But numbers were never my strong suit
It's all a joke I once was told
And pass off nightly as my own

So give it up for giving in
For stubbing toes on stones you've thrown
It's everyone's fault but your own
And owning up to only what
You can't explain away
With shrugs or waves or little phrases
Predicted phases or fronts

So give it up for giving in
To find the key to please and the words to plead
For increased credibility
Amongst the proper tongues
Who taste the trials and the triumphs
And decide that neither one of them's enough
Track Name: Extreme Fever
Crystalline and delicate
Or disparate and cheap
I am waiting for the opportunity

I am sweating out my sympathy

And I'm still learning to reconcile
My art and vehement denial
Of holy, fault, and death
My sizable smile relents

A snake of a man in the grass
So I stand
Sit, take my weight of off my feet
Stretch, dissect intangibilities

Sever the stubborn, disavow the beliefs
The practical person pretends
He's already made his amends

I am under no illusions
I am underground
But I still breathe in
In and out and in and out

Simple, elegant seclusion
I am coming out
Ashamed of only time I could have spent
Doing something else

I've typically been the kind to doubt
The importance of a balance found
Between irrelevant skeletons
And a beautifully green-screened background

But the longer I sit and I shake and I wait
For particles to align in agreeable shapes
I relinquish my expert opinion on hate
And I strain and I scrape and it breaks

So I say
I am under no illusions
I am underground
Ashamed of only time I could have spent
Doing something else
Track Name: Who Knows
Probably
I'm not as angry as I should be
A stiff and stoic apology
From a crumbling bastion of closed-eyed empathy

I don't believe
In the curative properties
Of rivers or of centuries-old exercises for our egos or
Of pushing my beliefs on anybody

I've already lost them
I couldn't care less

Suddenly
I am brought to my knees
By all the things I see
So unabashedly
In disrepair
Insight inciting fires in my stare
So goddamn self-aware
In conflict or in tandem with the "I don't cares"
As genuine as irony thrown unprepared

And ignorant and faultless
Like the men nailed up on crosses
The horizon duly dotted
On any given day

If I leave
Or is it when, I mean?
I will turn around
And take in everything
And I'd expect that I will see
There was always something there for me
Track Name: Normal Sized Words
Butcher the song
Tear out the pages of back catalogues
Endeavor whatever revisionist wont
Scrape off your shoes
On the walk to the room
That you sent off a check for last month

Denounce what you've done
For the sake of nostalgia
Remember you're still young
And problems aren't problems
Unless you're too old, sad, or tired to solve them
You're none of the above

Scavenge through the sorts of things
You wouldn't want to touch
To find the definition of "enough" is too much

Settle for love
For comfort, security
And curse the good luck
You can't lose
There isn't a soul in the world
You'll find flawless
And guess what?
You're one of them

Accept the relentless
Omnipresent tug
Admit you've not changed all that much

Where the blood on my hands is concerned
I'm not worried
I'm just sick of thinking circular
Confirming sad but true but sure
What if there's no other way
A balanced scale, two equal weights
One for each shoulder

Where the taste on my tongue is concerned
I'll continue to spit at and spurn
Each part of speech that attempts to explain
The mundane or the meaningful
With the right set of eyes you'll find life at a funeral
Track Name: Adm Gives Up The Dream
I sat along the sand and rocks
Like a thousand contemplative songs
Anyone who knows me knows I spent the night inside
The wind was radiator hum
The sand was dust
The setting sun was the ever dimming laptop light as the battery died
Welcome to the future
Welcome to the new year
Where if that's a poignant image, then I don't want to write

I slept through the scenery
If there ever was a view
And drowned it out with dreams about what it looks like in truth
Cause we like to think we've conquered
That we've overcome the odds
But we're only as accomplished as the least inviting arms
If I make a record
If I hold myself to standards
If I stick to a song or I work for too long I'm just turning myself in

I know where I come from
And I know what I have done
I know where I come from

And I know what I have done
And I know what isn't realistic
But if the seeds I sow don't grow that's self-fulfilling
And I don't buy that anymore so
I skip between suburban homes
And the sort of comfort I've always known
That I resent but represents an actual goal
Maybe I don't want to finish anything
Maybe all the big work's done and carted off
And all I'm left with is small talk

I know where I come from
And I know what I have done
I know where I come from

And I know what I have done
And I know what I wouldn't rather do
I meant what I said, but I sounded so damn desperate that it didn't sound true

I sat along the sand and rocks
Like a thousand contemplative songs
I sat along the sand and rocks
Like a thousand contemplative songs

I sat along the sand and rocks
Like a thousand contemplative songs
Anyone who knows me knows I spent the night inside