From the recording THE MARIONETTE: This & That from Hither & Yon
If you were offered eternal life, what would you be willing to sacrifice to secure it? What if the price was everything? Everything you hold most dear, taken from you in exchange for unfailing health and life everlasting. Would you do it? What would immortality be worth to you? This is the question asked and answered by several souls in J. Allen Williams’ feature film, Everything. I had the great fortune to be cast as Old Scratch himself, and while I was doing my bit for the movie that question was, quite unavoidably, festering in my brain. This is the result.
Lyrics
Some say everything we know is but a vision in a dream
And death, the soul awakening to its true reality
But most just fear their dying day as the day they cease to be
Pleading and appealing to belay immortality
But fearful hearts, accosted and seduced
Fall willing hostage to guile pandering
Ransomed for everything
A young man sees the world as a pot of opportunity
Full of mystery and gold, women, wine, and the finer things
And the promise of every dream fulfilled
So when it says it needs him and it pleads for him to go
He knows that it’s his season, there are seeds he needs to sow
But even though his touch is golden
There’s so much he doesn’t know
But he fortifies his fortress and he conquers all he sees
To mollify his master and fulfill his carnal need
But there’s an absence at his core
Like an abscess, and it bleeds for something more
So youth fades and he ages
And he yearns to turn those pages back the other way... to recapture yesterday
And he wonders where the years went
And he’d give everything he spent his life acquiring
To feel that fire again, he’d say goodbye to everything
The deal is inked. Sealed with a wink. He didn’t think, just let it go
Gone in a blink. Tossed like a trinket. He watched it sinking in the inferno
And his contraband illusion refracts through fractured eyes as the devoured basks
In his fever-fed mirage of endless sand within the hourglass
But everything he loves lies dying on the altar
And he falters at the sight of all the sacrifice and slaughter
Conceit, conceding sanity, bartered all he had to offer for some festered dream
He thought was everything
Music & Lyrics by David Greathouse
© 2015, Sourdough Music, ASCAP
Featuring Pete Generous on Drums.