From the recording In The Afterlife Of Promises
The singer finds himself in a suffocating room and slowly realizes that the things trapping him aren’t iron bars but quiet, everyday compromises and “false habits, hate and lies” that have shaped his whole life. The song turns those invisible weights into a metaphorical chain, ending with the bitter insight that the jailer keeping him locked up is, in the end, himself. Ah, the relief you feel when you accept that you have failed in life. Based on a one-act play I once wrote: In Shackles.
Lyrics
August heat sleeps heavy on the room
Plastic moonlight tries to hide the gloom
I keep score with the man inside the screen
But lose myself in what might have been
Laughter canned like factory air
Something’s rusting inside my chair
You bring home a stranger with a poet’s grin
Calls our cage “cozy” as he steps right in
Your cigarette dances where his shadow falls
I taste iron in these paper walls.
You say, “Trust me, love, this won’t take long,”
But my heartbeat hums a different song
Shackles, they barely move
A quiet weight that shapes the groove
Tiny clicks in every compromise
Shackles of false habits, hate and lies
Some chains are iron, some are fear
Some are words whispered in your ear
And some look like a wedding band
A helping hand, a promised land
Till you feel the pull that you can’t undo
And realize the jailer looks just like you
Shackles, they barely move
A quiet weight that shapes the groove
Tiny clicks in every compromise
Shackles of false habits, hate and lies
Shackles, they barely move
A quiet weight that shapes the groove
Tiny clicks in every compromise
Shackles of false habits, hate and lies