Don’t Start – Song Description
“Can you hear the trumpets? Can you see the skies filled with wrath?” This is the angriest song I’ve written, and I’ve never tried to dress that up as something gentler than it is. I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think it reaches listeners the way the quieter songs in this collection do, and going back to it now, I still believe that’s true — but I’ve come to think that’s almost the honest point of keeping it rather than a mark against it. Anger this raw rarely translates cleanly outward into someone else’s experience. It mostly just proves, convincingly, that it happened to someone, without necessarily making a stranger feel it the way they might feel a quieter grief. That failure to fully transmit isn’t a flaw I’d fix if I could go back. It might be the most accurate thing about the song — real anger, in my experience, is often exactly this: enormous and entirely convincing from the inside, and considerably harder to hand to another person intact than sadness ever is.
[Verse 1]
To you, I say,
Think long before you start.
The words you say now
Will kill a breaking heart.
[Verse 2]
When you left,
You took away my soul.
It could have been
Your one and only goal.
[Chorus]
Can you hear the trumpets?
Can you see the skies
Filled with wrath?
Could this be your demise?
[Verse 3]
Be careful now—
What more you sow.
More hate, more thunder
Will walk with you.
[Bridge]
Every step, always there—
A mighty blunder.
[Final Verse]
Go now, leave me,
My time is done.
Be quick—
Before I reach for my gun.
Lyrics – Michael Forty