ericprincessdragon

Tag: travel

  • Fallen Giant

    Fallen Giant

    This song has a long history. The first demos date back to 2017. At this point I cannot remember what I was initially writing about, but the essence of the original demo remains somewhat in Fallen Giant – particularly in the instrumental section before the second verse and the outro.

    For years the song sat unfinished. It made it onto several lists of ideas to return to and through several rounds of song-a-week groups without ever getting developed. I never cared enough for it to record a full demo. Then in the spring of 2025 I was traveling the US with my dogs and at the end of a long journey we spent the last few days slowly making our way up the California coast, taking quality time amongst the redwoods of Humboldt and Del Norte counties. It was on a hike through the redwoods that we came across the fallen giant that inspired this final iteration of the song. I wrote some of my thoughts down at the time:

    I was hiking through the California coastal redwoods and came upon a fallen giant. The root system alone was massive – way bigger than me. I marveled at it at first, then walked around the side to see the actual tree, which must have fallen many years ago as its topside was completely covered with ferns, trees, clovers, moss. This tree must have lived at least a thousand years and now in death so much life springs forth – a whole new world growing off its back, with many plants and probably insects and other animals living their lives on and around the corpse of this giant.

    All the nutrients it had acquired in its very long life are released into the ecosystem to feed this new life. It’s beautiful. When we pass we may not be hundreds of feet tall and thousands of years old but the same fate awaits us.

    The bodies we inhabit, the seat of our ego and consciousness, will cease to exist in the static form we know and this transfer of energy and life will begin. The materials that make us up will be broken down and offered up to the environment. And that forward motion of life continues. I believe this is what reincarnation truly is. Compared to a lot of the myths that we’ve known in human history maybe it seems a little anticlimactic or dissatisfying. But it is true. If we decide that all we are is what is being projected from our brains then I don’t think there is anything for us after death. But if we are to identify ourselves with and recognize that we are not separate – that there is no us without our environment – then we can understand that the matter that makes us up is eternal. We will lose our sense of consciousness as we’ve known it, the human ego, memories, all of it will be gone. But what we are on the deepest physical level will remain in some form for longer than the redwood stood. Don’t be confused – just because the brain will cease to exist doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing. Because it’s happening just this once, here and now, it means so much more. We exist.

    Later, during the song-a-week group in the fall of 2025, I started to revisit the tune – which I had previously called Heaven Is Wasted – and was reminded of this new perspective and lesson from the redwood tree on the physical reincarnation of the body. I never really liked the overall lyrics and perspective in the previous version and felt this was something much more interesting and worth exploring. I took my writings from the spring and adapted them to make up the first verses.

    During this time I was visiting Crescent City weekly and taking regular trips to the redwoods around Highway 199 and a couple of trips up the Chetco River to the redwood groves in Oregon. I was searching for other fallen redwoods to sit with and contemplate and write on. I found that I wasn’t writing a lot during those visits – instead I was just reveling in their presence. I didn’t feel too inspired to write anymore on the subject at that point, and although I managed to write the middle section in that time, I didn’t know where the song would go. I sat and wrote the last verse amongst the redwoods in early February 2026 and everything was fleshed out and finalized during the final recording session.

    These days I’ve been splitting my time between Del Norte and Curry Counties, spending time with the redwoods as often as possible.

    In the redwood forest
    I find a fallen giant
    Whose roots tower over me
    Once touched the sky
    Now resting at my feet

    I walk around to take a look
    At the body of an ancient being
    A whole new world grows on it’s back
    And I’m humbled

    It must have lived a thousand years or more
    And now in death it bursts with
    Moss and ferns
    Slugs, birds, berries and clovers
    Salamanders, witches butter
    So much life and so much color

    I won’t live a thousand years
    I won’t grow 400 feet
    I don’t know when I’ll fall
    But when I do, I know what awaits me

    Like the fallen giant
    I will rest where I once stood
    All the little bits that made me up
    Will break down, go back to the earth
    And carry on
    Forever and ever
    Carry on
    Forever and ever

  • Maytag Land

    The song was mostly composed, arranged, and recorded within my van amidst travels down to Los Angeles in February 2026.

    The song began from a Reddit prompt: “Write a song about the happy land where socks are escaping to. But try to write it in a minor key, and add some twist.”

    It’s rare that I write from a prompt but I always appreciate prompt writing for pushing me to write something that otherwise most likely never would have been considered. It provides a kind of safe distance from what I’m writing – I don’t have to feel too attached. It’s a pure creative exercise with just enough structure to give me a direction and enough flexibility to be creative within it.

    I found this particular prompt interesting and a bit curious. I struggled at first to find an approach that made sense to me. I started writing about the many socks without pairs I’ve got in a drawer and a few other things that felt too concrete. Eventually I removed myself from the story and focused instead on it being a sort of recruitment song – from the socks to the listener. As I wrote those lines I started to view them as refugees, escaping a harsh reality to a place outside of time where they will not be used and abused, ripped up, chewed up and thrown away. For the darker twist, I wrote that there’s only one way in and no way out.

    As a jumping off point I started from visualizing the laundry room at my house, which was once the studio, but now the cat room with, like the song says, litter boxes and a catio door.

    This is an example of a song where I essentially wrote most of it away from the instrument. I started with the lyrics and then began to hear them set to a melody. The majority of the melodies were composed without even touching a guitar – I sang them into a voice note while driving. It was my second night on the road, waiting out a storm near Bakersfield, where I was set up in the van working out the melodies and harmonizing them on guitar.

    I had no concrete idea for a musical arrangement at that point. I kind of imagined it being arranged for piano, or sort of toy piano – almost like a song that would be in a children’s show. But ultimately the song took on a more straightforward guitar and vocal arrangement. The melody was set before I even touched the guitar though. There are several different movements in the song and everything was driven by this changing melody.

    Here’s the response I got from the Redditor who gave me the prompt:

    “This is GREAT! Cool 70s-like sound, carefree and well-done lyrics! ‘Join us in the dryer and shut the door behind you’ 😅 And the dryer sound in the end. A fantastic choice. Thank you for making my prompt into something so nice! 😊”

    I gave them a counter prompt in return: Write a song that tells a story in reverse chronological order – starting with the end, then the middle, ending with the beginning.

    I’d like to do something with that eventually. But for now, here’s Maytag Land.

    There’s a place
    Down the hall way
    Past the litter box and catio door

    A magic space
    There’s only one way
    In and no way out

    Where all is warm
    And all is fluff
    Theres treasure there
    And softness in the air

    Everyone’s an individual
    Not a single pair
    And you can join us there

    In Maytag land
    Come join our clan
    We’ll throw a sock party for you
    Be one of us
    We are not lost
    We have each other

    Just get into the dryer
    And shut the door behind you
    Those socks, you thought were lost?
    We’ll reunite you
    The bills and coins that disappeared are waiting for you
    Your guitar pick?
    We got that too
    You can play a little doodle loo

    In Maytag land
    Come join our band
    We’ll play a sock party with you
    Be one of us
    Join our chorus
    We’ll sing together

    La la la

    In maytag land
    Time sits still
    We don’t grow old
    And don’t grow holes
    Never stepped on never trashed
    Never ripped up by the cats
    We’ve left the cold hard world behind
    And we can’t go back

    Come join us in the dryer
    And shut the door behind you

  • Miles Away

    For several years I worked with the county providing audiovisual services – mainly during their routine business meetings. Commissioner meetings, workshops, budget committees. Any instance where the elected officials were set to discuss and vote on county business, I would be there making sure everything was captured on video and audio and streamed live to the public. There were periods where this was the most consistent money gig I had going.

    The commute was nearly 30 miles each way between Port Orford and Gold Beach – coastal highway the whole way, passing multiple state parks, untouched beaches, cliffs dropping straight into the Pacific. It should have been one of the more scenic commutes imaginable.

    I am a night owl and often struggled to balance weeks of late nights with a sudden 8 AM meeting with the commissioners. I would find myself sleep deprived on the way there and on the way home, not the best state to be working or traveling in. By the later part of my time with the county I was often running on autopilot – multitasking through the meetings themselves, working on music mixes or editing videos with the audio feed in one ear, sometimes taking long phone calls or leaving voice messages to friends while the meeting ran in the background. On tired drives home I might be in a total state of detachment, spaced out in far away sleepy thoughts. The drive would pass and I’d find myself home before I even knew it.

    There were days I felt I took that drive for granted entirely – all those breathtaking views of the wild Pacific just passing by unnoticed. Often enough I would pull over and take a moment to calibrate. Just feeling the breeze, looking out to the endless ocean, reminding myself – this is it. Sometimes I’d run out onto the beach or stand at the top of the cliffs above the crashing waves. Other times I’d stop at Sister’s Rock and walk out of sight of the highway and just sit and breathe.

    The song began on one of those drives home. I was coming around the south end of Humbug Mountain – winding roads where long straight stretches suddenly morph into tight turns, speed signs, roadside memorials reminding you to slow down and be careful. It was that passage that snapped me back one day. I had awakened in paradise. Coming around the last bend the ocean came back into view and the sky was brilliant. It became so clear in that moment that I’d been on autopilot – the whole drive up until that point had passed in a flash without me really noticing the sky or the sea. The song just started coming and I started singing – lately I’ve been losing my sense, I’m here sitting at the driver’s wheel but I’m miles miles away.

    The mortality thread in the song wasn’t entirely conscious at the time. All the roads with their twist and turns all leading to the same place. Here today we’re not here to stay. I’ll be there soon, I’ll be right back here on the one track. Looking back I think the connection was more subconscious – that great shock of presence, suddenly feeling so alive and aware, carries with it the recognition of how much time passes while you’re somewhere else. Going in and out of presence felt connected to going in and out of consciousness, in and out of life itself. To be drifted away in thought is still being alive, but in a sense it’s not really living.

    This song was something of a precursor to Body, written at least a couple of years before it. Both songs circle the same territory – the pattern of spending so much time outside of presence, outside of the body, occupied in thought and disconnected from the environment. Body was a more direct reckoning with that. Miles Away was where the realization first started to surface.

    The recording came during a day I spent experimenting with a compact setup for capturing video and audio while traveling – a kind of proof of concept for how I might document performances on the road. I stopped at a few locations, dealt with some overexposure issues and audio problems along the way. My last stop just before sunset was Sister’s Rock. I played through a few songs up on the cliffside as it got cold and the light faded, playing until almost dark. It was one of the last takes and the most usable. Sister’s Rock is one of my favorite stops along that drive – I’ll often go there at night with the dogs, especially on a stormy or moonlit night when I can hike out to the edge of the cliffs and down to the beaches without a flashlight. I’ve written and finished songs there more than once. It felt like the right place for this one.

    "Miles Away"

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here sitting at the driver's wheel
But I'm miles
Miles away

All the roads with their twist and turns
All leading to the same place

Back in the seat, looking all around me
I can't believe I'm almost halfway home
Ocean meets the sky
Great stars shine their light
My body is here in paradise
But I'm miles
Miles away
Miles away from here

We're here today we're not here to stay
And I just can't believe it
All the years all the folks
They're just passing by
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here strumming on this (pink) guitar
But I'm miles
Miles away from here

  • Perfect Time

    I arrived in Hobart in perfect time on March 20th. I was picked up at the airport by my new friend Dave, the kiwi I had met on Oahu. He took me to his home in Geilston Bay, the address of which is on my Tasmanian ID (valid till 2029). I arrived in the late evening so he got me set up in the guest space and showed me out to a space in the backyard where he kept his music gear. There he left me with the invite to play his drums, basses and acoustic guitar.

    I grabbed the guitar and the very first thing I started playing was this song. Perfect Time started with the intro – the melody and words came all at once:

    You can’t miss when you don’t aim
    Sit still and take it all in

    Guts tame our wounded hearts
    Press our heads to the grumbles

    Just like that I was off with the chord change, and the song dropping into the main section. The lines continued to come to me:

    There’s a song in the distance
    I can’t call the tune
    But I’ll sing what I hear and you can harmonize

    And it continued:

    We may never catch up to the tune
    We may be gone too soon
    But we care not for the future
    Here in perfect time

    All of this came all at once as soon as I touched the guitar. This would become the theme for my arrival on the island in the days to come.

    Around that time, I had been considering that acceptance is essential if I ever wish to be in accordance with reality. Anything and everything that occurs in our universe, for better and for worse, is “meant to be.” All the triumph and tragedy that brings about hope and joy, suffering and despair, is the only law and order in an otherwise chaotic existence.

    I spend plenty of time thinking about the past. Sometimes I’ll allow my mind to trail off to thoughts of what could’ve been – what I could’ve said, what I could’ve done differently, if I’d just kept walking down that road or turned my back on something before it was too late. These thoughts are not helpful, generally speaking. But I was coming back to this idea that I must accept that everything happens in perfect time. Although I could imagine things that could’ve been done to change the course of reality, the fact that something occurred simply means that was the only way it could’ve been. To deny that, to fight it, to try and think my way out of it or around it, would be to break from reality.

    It’s easy to say in moments of hope and optimism that everything happens in perfect time. It’s harder to say when tragedy strikes, when a dear friend is lost too soon, in moments where it sinks in that every living thing must die, recognizing that someday I will have to say farewell to all things.

    I spend so much time trying to make sense of the past, anticipating and predicting the future, yet the only thing that really matters, the only thing that exists, is right now. Right now is not a problem to be solved, only an experience to be had. In the clearest moments, we can settle into that presence, and all fear and anxiety and worry and dread will wash away.

    I had the first chunk of the song for some time, and I played around with it throughout the time I spent on my first trip to Tasmania. But I didn’t end up finishing the song until later in the year when I was back home during one of the song-a-week challenges.

    One cliché says it all: life is full of surprises.
    Don’t know how much time we got
    How many sunrises
    We may never see another moon
    We may be gone too soon
    But we care not for the future
    Here in perfect time

    The song is really quite simple in its scope. My mind goes off into mortality. There’s a layer of melancholy and melancholic contemplation lining the core of my being, rarely without presence in my thoughts. But this song is meant to be a declaration of acceptance – acceptance of our own mortality, an acceptance and letting go of all worry for a future that is not guaranteed, that does not exist, and on some fundamental level, a future that does not concern us.

    I have seen people express this idea that 1,000 years may pass, 10,000 or 100,000 years may pass, eventually everyone we knew, everything we knew, every trace and memory of us may be gone – and therefore, what is the point? But the events of this universe 100,000 years from now are even more meaningless than we could ever be, because we exist. We are here now, and in that, life has great meaning.

    The future is not guaranteed. We understand that the universe will go on, but the future for us, for humanity, for our ancestors, is not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is this present moment, so long as we are here. We exist, and here we shall remain – in perfect time.

  • Oahu Noodles

    “Oahu Noodles” is a track made up of couple of improvisations I recorded on the porch of Backpackers Vacation Inn & Hostel on the north side of Oahu, Hawaii. The first week of March 2024, I was making my way to Australia for the first time and saw flights that transferred at Honolulu airport, so I decided to book a 4 night layover, rent a car and explore Oahu for a few days.

    Through couchsurfing I had lined up a sweet spot to stay on a small boat during my visit, but the day before I arrived the stay fell through. In between a bus trip across Oregon and a couple flights over I was frantically trying to find another couchsurfing situation, researching places I might be able to sleep safely in the rental car (which is illegal and highly discouraged on Oahu!), I was able to stay for the night of my arrival with some coast guard dudes but finally ended up booking a hostel on the north side for the rest of my stay. I was bummed at first but it ended up being a great landing and shaped the trajectory of my entire trip.

    One of my roommates at the hostel was a folk musician who, nearly 50 years earlier, had nearly slid to his death while hiking a nearby trail. He told me that besides two major heart attacks he had later in life, that fall was the closest he had come to death. He told me that he slid and slid and slid until he came to the edge of a ridge with a perilous drop below. He was able to walk along the ridge, which formed a nice natural trail. Eventually, he found his way back to civilization, but that spot stuck with him.

    Now here he was in his early 70s, retired from his trade, returning for the second year to stay for a month and try to find the site of his near-death experience. Each day he would go off to hike and search for this elusive ridge. He was nearing the end of his trip and told me that if he didn’t find it this time, he’d be coming back the next year to continue his search. While he was out searching for a needle in a haystack, I was trying to get lost – driving around, meeting many dead-end roads, gates, fences, trespassing signs and so on. In hindsight, I should’ve tagged along with him, but I was content wandering around the island, swimming, eating and playing guitar in the sun, and on a rainy day – shooting video as I made my way around the island. I later cut the video to the “noodles”:

    One evening we threw together an impromptu open mic out on the porch. We started with only a cheap hostel guitar, which I drove across the island to buy strings for, cleaned up, strung up and tuned up. Eventually, with some imagination, I managed to set up an electric guitar, vocal and little synthesizer amplified with my laptop and a Bluetooth speaker. Hostel folks came by the porch to hang out, listen, sing, and jam.

    One of the musicians who came by was a fella named Dave Lee, a New Zealand-born musician who had been living in Tasmania for almost a decade. He came out to Hawaii for a surfing trip and joined us on the porch where we jammed, swapped tunes and riffs, and had an all-around good time. Dave plays bass in a Tassie band called Lennon Wells. Our meeting inadvertently directed my trip, as just a week later I would find myself in South Australia, looking for leads and opportunities to get involved with events across Australia when I saw that Lennon Wells was playing a small festival in Tasmania called Echo Fest. I reached out to the festival and offered my help, they invited me along straight away. From one island to the next, Oahu to Tasmania.

    The noodles of “Oahu Noodles” were recorded on the porch, the morning of my last day on the island. I took my little guitar/synth rig and ran it into a handheld recorder, along with my phone feeding basic drum tracks. I played through headphones until the recorder batteries died. I would be flying out to Sydney that afternoon, so this was my last chance to capture something from the island. I offered to give another roommate a ride to the airport before my flight, and we spent the afternoon driving across the island with just enough time for a waterfall hike, pictured above and below.

  • Scroll Hole/Alex

    “Scroll Hole”

    I like short songs. I don’t like being addicted to the phone. If I’m going to be addicted to the phone I might as well make short songs about it. This is based on true, recurring events. This ditty tells the story of reaching for my phone to perform a simple task (tuning a guitar) and mindlessly getting lost scrolling instagram. I wrote the song in March 2024, finishing the recording and shot the video while staying in the guestroom of my friend and his mum’s house in the suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. While they were off working I was in the dark with my face buried in a camera lens, experimenting with the video edits to pull off what I saw in my head. Watch the video here:

    I’m reaching to do something quick and simple on my phone
    Then suddenly
    I get lost
    In a hole as I scroll I have no control at all
    I’m sinking
    Precious fleeting
    Moments of my life
    That I’ll never get back
    I can’t recall
    A single thing that I was just looking at

    I never close this app with more than
    I had when I opened it

    Where was I at
    Oh that’s right
    All I was trying to do was open up the tuner app

    LISTEN


    Every video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
    https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragon

    Alex

    I will add some additional notes to fill in some details of the trip from Oahu onto Tassie. I will also take a detour to talk about my good friend Alex and some of our adventures around the globe.

    I arrived in Australia on March 12, just two days before my birthday, beginning a one-year working holiday visa. I flew on a one-way ticket with more luggage and gear than I had ever traveled with before. I wanted to be ready for a whole range of possible gig/recording/photo/video scenarios and packed enough gear to perform as a solo act, take photos & videos in different scenarios, record myself or a full band, put on an impromptu hostel porch open mic and more. Between the guitar, backpack, and big suitcase, it was too much to comfortably lug around a city, on buses, trains, or the side of the road – too much even to easily stash at a hostel. I had planned to purchase a vehicle as soon as I arrived and continue my adventure into the unknown. The only step of the trip I had figured out was the very first: arrival in Adelaide and a stay with my longtime friend and travel buddy Alex.

    Alex is a multi-talented fella and all around sweet heart. He is a photographer, actor, ASMR artist and after living and traveling around the world for years has settled back into his home in Adelaide working for VFX company Rising Sun Pictures.

    We first met in the winter of 2013 when I was working in Granada, Spain at a hostel called Makuto. He came in as a guest while touring Europe and we hit it off, wandering the cobblestone city, sharing travel stories, and hiking out early one morning to catch the sunrise over La Alhambra.

    I was nearing the end of my stint in Granada and nearly ready to head to Berlin for Christmas & New Years. As it turned out, Berlin was one of Alex’s next stops and our visits would overlap. Just a week or two later we met up to spend more quality time wandering, this time in the grittier urban setting of Berlin. One of the highlights from that visit was attending an event in the basement of a bookstore – a storytelling open mic where everyone was encouraged to get up and tell an improvised story on a particular theme. That night the theme was “family.”

    We both joined the audience and told our stories. I spoke about my grandparents and what I knew of their migrations from Cuba & Mexico, of my paternal grandfather working in forced labor camps operated by the new Cuban government under Fidel Castro. I spoke of my maternal grandparents being robbed by the “coyotes” they hired to take them across the border and my mother eventually crossing into the US underneath the seat of a car as a child. And I spoke of my life and travels being a walk in the park in comparison to the experiences they endured.


    After Berlin we went our separate ways, keeping in touch but living worlds away, both of us traveling regularly over those next years. Eventually, in 2016, Alex’s travels brought him to North America and he came to visit me in LA. I was living in San Bernardino County at a warehouse at the time – a condemned building which just a year or so later would be demolished without a trace, but at that time provided refuge for a large cast of artists, musicians, hippies, stoners, and weirdos. Me being one of the all-those-things. We went wandering around the area from the warehouse, my childhood home (Acaso) out to downtown LA where we drove past tent cities and looked over the skyline. Alex returned to the US once again in 2018 and our adventures continued around my new home in Oregon. Across over a decade we have met up on three continents in four countries.

    Back to 2024: I felt like family coming to stay with Alex and his mum, an intelligent and hilarious woman from South Africa. We shared lots of interesting conversations and she took an active interest in helping me figure out my next move. When I first got the inkling to go to Tasmania, she was very encouraging, recounting the itinerary of her honeymoon trip around Tassie while I saved the locations of all her favorite places on the map. I remember just after that conversation, finding Frying Pan Studios while researching Tasmania and being overcome with a sense that I must go there and record. Tasmania was pulling me in.

    I only stayed about a week in Adelaide, and Alex was working for much of that week, but we found time to do plenty of wandering around Adelaide and take a trip along the coast of South Australia, share meals with his family, catch some comedy at Adelaide Fringe and share plenty of d&m (deep and meaningful conversations) along the way. Here are some photos taken on film. I shot the photo of him, and he the photos of me.

    Also within that week I managed to fit in an all nighter, staying up past sunrise working on the Scroll Hole video. The song was written just before I left for Australia, but I recorded it, shot the video and mixed/edited everything right there in Alex’s family home.

    On March 20th, after a quality stay in Adelaide, I was off for Hobart.

  • Gutter Baby

    In all my travels, never have I met a gnarlier bunch of traveling folks than the “gutter punks.” I once got off a bus in New Orleans and immediately got heckled by one across the street yelling, “Hippie! Give me money!” Hitchhiking around the U.S. and Canada, I met quite a few – jamming, sleeping and hanging around on the streets, trying to catch lifts along the way.

    Inspired by people I met on the street around Montreal, Humboldt & Mendocino counties, this song is an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard from these folks, some of my own experiences traveling, and some inspiration for a happy ending from someone who made it out from the streets into a “normal” life.

    My first demo for this song was completed in January 2024 as part of a song-a-week challenge. Though most of it was written then, some of the lines go back to a dusty notebook I filled around 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking around the states real heavy. I was looking for notes for another song when I found these words. I scrapped most of what I had written then, but the core idea was there – the story of a “Gutter Baby.”

    Just a baby
    Fourteen years old
    Scared to go back home
    Take your chances
    Hiding in the streets
    And learning to survive
    Starting a new life as
    A gutter baby

    Find some punks on the street
    Who take you under their wing
    They get you high and teach you to get by and you start traveling
    In every new town new trouble with the same struggles
    You graduate from the bottle to the pipe and to the needle
    Oh gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Gutter baby
    Rabid on the street
    How did the world forsake you
    Gutter baby
    They got you hooked
    Hooked on poison hooked on violence
    Hooked on crime giving every reason
    For them to jack you up
    Gutter baby

    The cops know just who to fuck with when they spot you on their beat
    They’ll take any excuse to pluck you off the street
    They don’t care whether they lock you up or drive you to the edge of their town
    And they know that no ones gonna trip if they beat the shit out of
    A gutter baby
    Gutter baby

    Not a baby
    You’re growing old
    With dreams of your own
    Done with trouble
    All the drugs and drama
    All the death and all the trauma

    You leave it in the past
    You’re cleaning up your act
    You’re going to be a dad
    Now you have yourself a chance
    To give a love you never had
    A baby
    Your baby

    It ain’t easy to build when you’ve been beaten down
    And thought you’d be the next young punk to end up in the ground
    You’ve been cast aside abused and brutalized and didn’t know why
    But all the pain and trouble means nothing when you look in those eyes
    And see no struggle
    No fear
    No struggle
    Just a baby