Kurt Elling - Tanya Jean lyrics

rate me

Hips swayin’ to the beat (lip smackin’, honey-sweet).

Magnolias in the street – dust under Tanya’s feet.

Melody:

Dig with me this chick lording every clique, name of

Tanya Jean.

Even in the thick she’ll never miss a trick. She’s a

royal queen.

Swingin’ down the block, stoppin’ every clock, wiggin’

every scene -

She’s got a flock (a man in every dock) diggin’ Tanya

Jean.

But if she ever would think, for once, she would see

that she has been a dunce -

never digging her brains and her beauty are more than

the usual front.

She could be swinging ad libitum ’stead of just acting

like she was dumb.

(Up and running to run all the savages’s no more than

just a stunt.

Solo:

“Come dancing with me in a little dream, Tanya Jean,”

said Prophet-Man-With-One-Hand-Put-Away. “And we will

seek together the stolen vision (vision that was hidden

by lovers gone and poets buried). Time, swing over:

gonging and banging late-in-life clock assembling a

three-ring, peddling a new thing. Telling time, telling

tales, telling sights, filling pails with alabaster

springing. Here’s your life upon a plate regarding its

fate. Senility’s rumored.”

“How can you eat that,” asks the girl, with a smirk.

“Don’t you see how every day, come what may, it’s

growing – you jerk, you. And thirty centuries of

sleeping won’t make a dent in giving the time that it’s

needing. Flipping to appendices, Demosthenes, won’t

bring about the stumbling of a Beast with weaker knees.

This I tell you. So dig it.”

“Don’t wig it. Come along with me and envision the

vision. Maybe then, you will feel. Like the rumbling of

a train on tracks a hundred miles away, you can hear

pretty clear – like the echoes of the footfalls of

childhood in rooms – like a fire, sire, like a pyre; a

singing out of desire. Dark angelic bodies in a flying

circus come bombing over Flander’s Fields.

“And what if darkened drummers who can play just like

Elvin never escape the mandibles of their mothers,

keeping silence when screaming upwards from deep within

his inner voice – crying into the vortex of night,

subtle terrors make writing a scrawling of dying-wish

notes? Time to make another adversary list up to the

sky as you travel by.

“Suddenly bidding is asking. And then it’s wishing. You

can’t stretch your arms out like a lord enfolding

thousand stars. So dig it. And lonliness is rolling

over levees like a suicidal tidal surge – upending

illusiories, strong, of living as defensive. Meanwhile,

intimacy calls us into dangers with a siren song of

loving long in luxury-to-be (secret, unnameable surging

of love into what must always be). It’s spilling over

infinity to become behemoth: everything, everywhere,

everyone, everytime. The kingdom comes from ancient,

howling cries of MotherGods.

“Screaming across the open plains of nothingness comes

everything that might have been, like great comets

blasting through every dark sky. So what if L.T.

Dexter’s swinging has rarified Mid-Atlantic sounds of

Jazz in silk scarves and all fall-colored Paris nights?

And Charlie Parker’s with him, blowing on his over-

grown pitoodle stick and reaching through the thicker

places in our heads (intelligence was never, ever,

surely, this hard to find). Dig what I’m saying: just

because we’ll never know The Secret doesn’t mean that

we should find that we have sold ourselves, like

Joseph, into bondage again – time and again, until the

end.

“My friend, take your practiced powers and stretch them

across the void until everything living has a chance to

ponder every contradiction. That might be everyone’s

doable mission. Just like when Herbie’s playing piano –

then you can hear it, ’cause he can play it. You don’t

forget it ’cause Herbie said it when he spoke like a

child playing jacks on the floor of a kitchen. And

Hermann Hesse said it: ‘You’ll search for truth among

the planets and never find a truer voice than that

voice which is calling it out to you – calling you to

at least become a human. Instead of being confounded by

being. Instead of surfing in the dirt like a serpent,

go dance in the whirlwind.’ For those who have heard

it, God becomes a silence, huge and glowing, flowing

from the deepest inner places inside of your heart.

“It’s saying, ‘Go moaning and groaning, alone-ing. Go

rolling on the breast of earth. Report you truly all

the lives you see there, like a song growing golden-

ripe, like the wheat. Take it! Take this cup I’m

passing to you. Drink it. Think it way down into the

entrails of your thinking. What moves in secret is not

ever nothing. If gateways of seeing were opened, then

we could see that everything is just as it always is;

infinitely infinite.’

“But now, you see? Time is growing short for me.”

Pow! Poof. The dreaming was over. But Prophet-Man had

put mind into motion: Tanya Jean was then, hereafter

seen to be the queen of what we later called the scene

in which a body haverim careen like on the ceiling of

the Sistine Chapel. Wow.