ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
”My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings.
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Lyrics by Percy Bysshe Shelley

echoes of you

I had a dream about you
Last night. It was sweet:
An answer to a “What if?”
I’d have liked to see.

For so very long you have been
A central part of me;
Far out of sight, but embedded
In my memory.

Echoes of you,
Reverberations of days gone by
Resonate with everything,
In my mind or before my eyes.

A healing music beckons
Me to join its tune,
But if I add my vocie, the
Old songs soon resume.

I never finished that love
Song, but its melody
Begs a conclusion to its
Outdated poetry.

For so very long I have been
Entombed in memory,
Seeking the end of a love
Song that can never be.

Echoes of you,
Reverberations of days gone by…
Don’t know how I’ll kill the silence
If I let the music die.

ozymandias/echoes of you ep

2020

This little EP was put together to flesh out my content on the streaming services. “Ozymandias” is a pretty old song, as far as mine go; I wrote it in 2010 as a setting for Shelley’s poem. I was strolling down memory lane, playing Ultima, arguably the first computer role playing game, and my quest took me to The Pillar of Ozymandias, whereupon a plaque containing the climactic quote from the poem is fixed. Vaguely remembering something from an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus (specifically the “Michael Ellis” episode), I got curious and took to the internet. Soon I found Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” and was inspired to write a song. I recorded a demo of it back then, a more polished version in 2012 (which you can hear on my Toast EP), and then this final version in the late spring of 2017.
”Echoes of You” is also pretty old. I started writing the lyrics the morning after I had the dream mentioned in the song, some time in the summer of 2012, when I rode my motorcycle out from my home in Aloha, Oregon to Netarts Bay, on the coast. By the time I got back home, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted the music to sound like, and I soon recorded it much as you can hear it today, but I wasn’t satisfied with my lyrics until about four years later. In maybe September, 2016, before my workload at my new school got too crazy, I had finally finished the song to my satisfaction.

The artwork is a photo I took just about directly between Netarts Bay and Cape Meares, with a partial image of a statue of Froila I of Asturia edited in.
The photo of Froila I, by Alejandro Moreno Calvo, was modified and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.