I didn’t know anything then about odd-metered bars of music, but as Burt told me years later, you don’t count those beats, you just feel them and the… - Elvis Costello

We’re not the ones making all the false promises, then getting caught in an obvious lie or with our fingers in the till. Maybe that’s why they call them “the fortunes of war.” They can be quoted on the stock exchange.

Life is so strange
I don't know why
But somebody, somebody has to cry.

My first lyric departed directly from Mingus’s title “This Subdues My Passion.” If you didn’t think the song was already half written after that title, then you had no business dallying with the tune in the first place. I wrote about the way that music tempers the violence within a man. This subdues my passion And it may control my rage It may stem the poison that spills out onto the page