From the recording Bits 'n' Bobs
Where the aged son rummages through a dusty box of family relics—ticket stubs, postcards, grocery lists—and feels his parents’ whole life flicker in these scraps of “broken dreams and bottled fear,” a love they “never learned to say” buried in everyday debris. Driving off with a “car full of ghosts and unpaid debt,” he understands how deeply that inherited love, disappointment and unspoken pain shaped his own uncertain road.
Lyrics
There’s a cardboard box in the hallway light
Smells like dust and rainy nights
Ticket stubs and Polaroid skin
Dad’s old lighter with no more flame within
I hear the wipers in my head again
Their wedding car in the pouring rain
Two soaked people in borrowed grey
Promising forever on a cheap bouquet
Every scrap of them is hiding in this room
Little stars around a borrowed moon
Bits ’n’ bobs of every year
Broken dreams and bottled fear
Folded vows and rent receipts
Ashes from a hundred small defeats
Bits ’n’ bobs, a life in threads
Coffee rings and unmade beds
The love they never learned to say
Trying to outshout the noise of every day
There’s a postcard stamped from some “sweet place”
Smudged ink, tired jokes from my father’s hand
A tabloid page with a marching face
Riot smoke and blood in another land
Mum’s handwriting on a grocery list
“Don’t forget the milk”, “don’t forget to exist”
On the back she drew a tiny little sun
Like she knew the dark in me had already won
I hold their stills in my mind like worn-out charms
A whole lost country rocking gently in my arms
Bits ’n’ bobs of every year
Broken dreams and bottled fear
I stack their lives in careful piles
And feel them flicker through my own exiled miles
Bits ’n’ bobs, I turn the key
Drive out into their legacy
Car full of ghosts and unpaid debt
Always chasing a future I don’t know yet