Black Flies Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Humid wood, you felt good
And you shook your tangled hair down
With the sweat in your eyes
And all the black flies, under lidded skies
You lie down there in the grasses
On the clifftop, you remember salt stinging in your lashes
Straight line of horizon, and the ocean painful wide
Every time you come back here, you feel nothing
And then you cry out all the strangeness
You have carried all year
Every crooked word spoken still ringing in your ears
Like the whine of mosquitoes

[Chorus]
Oh, who are you alone?
With your cheek against the stone
What do you think you know?

[Verse 2]
Under lidded skies
Under the rising clouds of black flies
Under tangled branches way up
High glinting in the last light
You left, you got into the car
Sink down into the fabric
And you close the heavy metal door
With your hands upon the plastic
And drive on into the cold
So calm, like it don't matter
Like slipping into a pond
All the little waves roll and scatter

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About

Genius Annotation

Tamara Lindeman, in an interview with The Independent:

In a song like ‘Black Flies’, for instance, I was trying to describe my encounters with the natural world, and sometimes how you step into a situation where you feel incredibly impacted by it,” she says, “then you leave and you get in your car and close the door and you drive away, and it’s as though it didn’t matter.”

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