[Intro] [Verse 1] Mama said it’s time for bed, switched off the bedside light But underneath the blanket I kept riding through the night Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, dust upon the plain Paper horses gallop through a concrete block of rain Snow was on the windowsill, not the Rio Grande But I could hear the eagles in that German printing land Turned the final page and felt a silence in my chest That’s how it ended for me The end of the Wild West [Melodic Interlude] [Verse 2] They never wrote the broken treaties in those cowboy books Just sunsets, rifles, silver saddles and the hero look No smallpox on the blanket, no hunger in the camps Just campfires made of adjectives and harmless paper lamps The railroad drew a straight line through the painted sky Barbed wire cut the open range and left it high and dry History signed the papers, put the land under arrest That’s how it ended for them The end of the Wild West [Chorus] Not with a showdown on the dusty street But a quiet closing of a dream A bookshelf door where worlds retreat Back into ink and faded seams No trumpet blast, no final gun Just a boy who reads and then switches off the sun A whisper more than a protest That’s the end of the Wild West [Guitar Solo] [Verse 3] Now the prairie is a dashboard with a glowing screen Cowboys trade their horses for a wifi’d silver sheen Sheriffs wear a logo, not a weather-beaten star Outlaws hide in data now, not in some border bar Clicks replace the cattle herds, they move in algorithm lines Gold rush turned to crypto dreams and dopamine in spines Every wild frontier we find gets fenced like all the rest That’s how it’s ending for us The end of the Wild West [Chorus] Not with a showdown on the dusty street But a quiet closing of a dream From paperback to server heat We ride on someone else’s stream No trumpet blast, no final gun Just another terms of service we have to click “done” A whisper more than a protest That’s the end of the Wild West [Outro] Mama said it’s time for bed, I closed the final spine Somewhere in the darkness they rode over the horizon line If freedom is a story that we learn and then forget I lost and found it in those pages yet I blew out the candle, felt it cooling in my chest And I still hear a distant hoofbeat From the end of the Wild West
