Top Songs By Kurt Elling
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Credits
PERFORMING ARTISTS
Kurt Elling
Vocals
Paul Wertico
Drums
Eric Hochberg
Upright Bass
COMPOSITION & LYRICS
Kurt Elling
Composer
Donald Byrd
Composer
PRODUCTION & ENGINEERING
Kurt Elling
Producer
Paul Wertico
Co-Producer
Roger Heiss
Recording Engineer
Danny Kopelson
Mastering Engineer
Greg Calbi
Mastering Engineer
Laurence Hobgood
Producer
Lyrics
[Verse 1]
Hip swayin' to the beat
Lips smackin', honey sweet
Magnolias in the street
Dust under Tanya's feet
[Verse 2]
Dig with me this chick
Lordin' 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
[Verse 3]
But if she ever would think for once
She would see that she has been a dunce
Never diggin' her brains and her beauty are more than the usual front
[Verse 4]
She could be swingin' ad libitum
'Stead of just actin' like she was dumb
Up and runnin' to run all the savages no more than just a stunt
[Verse 5]
Come dancin' 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 bangin late-in-life clock assembling
A three-ring peddlin' a new thing
Telling time, telling tales
Filling pails with alabaster springing
Here's your life upon a plate regarding it's fate, senility's rumored
[Verse 6]
"How can you eat that?" Asked the girl with a smirk
"Don't you see how everyday, come may it'w growing, you jerk, you
And thirty centuries of sleeping
Won't make a dent in giving the time that it's needing
Flipping through appendices, Demosthenes, won't bring about the
Stumblin' of a beast with weaker knees, this I tell you, so dig it
[Verse 7]
Don't wig it, come along with me and envision the victory
Maybe then, you will feel
Like the rumblin' of a train on tracks a hundred miles away
You can hear me pretty clear, like the echoes of the foot of childhood
In rooms
Like a fire, sire, like a pyre
A singin' out of desire
Dark angelic bodies in a flyin' circus
Come come bombing over Flander's Fields
[Verse 8]
And what if darkened drummers who can play just like Elvin
Never escaped 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 traveled by
[Verse 9]
Suddenly bidding is asking
And then it's wishing
You can't stretch your ams out like a lord
Enfolding thousand stars
So dig it
And loneliness is rolling over levees like a suicidal tidal surge
Upending' illusiories, strong, of livin' as a defensive
[Verse 10]
Meanwhile, intimacy call us into dangers with a siren of songs
Of loving long in luxury-to-be
Secret, unnameable surging of love into what what must always be
It's spilling over infinity to be become
Behemoth, everything, everywhere, everyone, everytime
The kingdom comes from ancient, howling cries of Mother Gods
[Verse 11]
Screamin' across the open plains of nothingness
Comes everything that might have been
Like great comets blastin' through every dark sky
So what if L-T Dexter's swingin' has
Rarified Mid-Atlantic sounds of Jazz
In silk scarves and all fall-colored Paris nights?
And Charlie Parker's with him
Blowin' on his over-grown pitoodle stick and reachin' 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 sold ourselves, like Joseph, into bondage again
Time and again, until the end
[Verse 12]
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 playin' 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
Playin' jacks on the floor of a kitchen
And Hermann Hesse has said it
You'll search for truth among the planets
And never find a truer voice than that voice which is
Callin' 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 form the deepest
Inner places inside of your heart
[Verse 13]
It's saying
Go moaning and groaning, enrolling 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 was down into the entrails of your thinkin'
What moves in secret is not ever nothing
If gateways of seeing were opened, then we could see
That everything always is just as it always is
Infinitely infinite
But now you see, time is growing short for me
[Verse 14]
Pow, poof, gone
Te 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
[Verse 15]
Hip swayin' to the beat
Lips smackin', honey sweet
Magnolias in the street
Dust under Tanya's feet
Written by: Donald Byrd, Kurt Elling