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songs & lyrics

Forget (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

This song, the final song on This Side of Paradise, was written after spending just under four years living in the Palestinian West Bank from 1994-1998. Arriving in the U.S. for the first time, and starting to play the coffee bar circuit, this was the hand grenade song to drop in that context. Writing began in a hotel in the Dakotas, as President Bill Clinton prepared for a large bombing campaign of Iraq, and the news networks started pumping out the standard green bombsight, video game images and the usual accompanying worship of military hardware.


Final version of lyrics: Saturday, December 19th, 1998


Forget (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

seen too many things i'd like to forget - the desire to civilise in a soldier's eyes
seen too many things i'd like to forget - bleeding teenagers on stretchers not at all sure if they're still alive
seen too many things i'd like to forget - september tanks on the hills around my town
seen too many things i'd like to forget - not being sure if you'll make it when you say that you'll come around

--arrest, arrest, arrest, arrest these things‹

seen too many things i'd like to forget - hope in a prisoner's eyes
seen too many things i'd like to forget - belief that manifests in lies
seen too many things i'd like to forget but i can't always ar-ar-ar-ticulate them all as yet
because there's some things that i believe that we just weren't meant to know or see
and i know that you know that we try to forget
as if the world outside will pretend with us as well
and i know that you know that we try to forget
welcome to the closest thing to this side of hell
seen too many things i'd like to forget - a border guard - knows he's your god for at least five minutes
while you die inside and wish you were not one of the not chosen ones
- the palestinian niggers of the middle east -
i mean would you want your children to conclude that they should never have been born with a genetic tan
or a different lan-lan-lan-
language is a whore we fall in love with and beg for more

i was never afraid until i realised that evil lives and breathes
outside of horror movies in the sound of the cock of guns on third world city streets
and i never realised that people even shot each other until i saw it with my own eyes

doodle - my own eyes, i'd scratch them out if i thought for a minute it would erase my mind -

you see i'm not ready to believe
that people can read and not find funny
about the 'accuracy' of a 'smart bomb'
that lands in completely the wrong country

have you ever thought about
the technology that we use to kill?
Have you ever thought that there's a design and testing process
or do statistics make you ill?

because it was former u.s. attourney general ramsey clark
that pointed out that our sanctions offed over and above
one and a half million iraqis
before the first missile even hit the ground.


8 and 19 December 1998, Minneapolis, Minnesota.



THIS SIDE OF PARADISE by NIGEL PARRY

This Side Of Paradise album cover"...a disc whose recommendation is its deftly managed intensity"

-- New Internationalist, August 2001


"Deeply moving songs... With quiet intensity, Parry gives voice to this
'invisible people' living under siege."


-- Lydia Howell, KFAI Radio,
90.3/106.7FM, Twin Cities, MN.


DOWNLOAD THE ENTIRE ALBUM FOR FREE ON THIS SITE!
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• First Dream (Unreleased)

• Graveyard Of Forgotten Souls (Unreleased)

• Christmas Fire (Unreleased)

• The Color Of Life (Unreleased)

• Peacemakers (Unreleased)

• All Of This (Unreleased)

• Whirlpools (Unreleased)

• Forget (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

• Too Many Thoughts (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

• Land Of The Shadow (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

• See How Both Of You Will Fly (This Side of Paradise, 2001)

• The Fire This Time (Mizna, Issue 1, Volume 3, 2001)

• I Need You (Unreleased)

• Him (Unreleased)

• Elapse (This Side of Paradise, 2001)


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