[Intro | E Minor | 104 BPM | bright driving acoustic guitar riff, upright bass, mandolin] [Verse 1 | driving acoustic guitar, upright bass, light snare] Maybe he was an egg. That's what everybody says. But I've always thought that seemed a little convenient. An egg falls off a wall and breaks. Nothing mysterious about it. Maybe he was a clock. Something ticking away while everybody watched until one day the mechanism stopped and no amount of winding could make it run the way it used to. Was he a man. Was he the king. was he a country after a war. Or was he just something fragile that everybody thought was stronger than it was. [Chorus | full folk-punk, catchy gang harmonies] All the king's horses! All the king's men! Came running when they heard the news! They brought everything the kingdom had Every hand! Every tool! Every cure! And they still couldn't put him back together again! Maybe that's the point! [Verse 2 | energetic acoustic strumming, mandolin fills] Think about that kingdom. The king had money. The king had soldiers. The king had people whose entire lives were dedicated to fixing problems. And when Humpty fell none of it mattered. You can have the finest doctors. The strongest armies. The smartest people in the world. You can have enough money to buy every answer anybody knows. And sometimes the thing that's broken is just broken no need to try to mend. [Chorus | bigger, rhythmic gang vocals] All the king's horses! All the king's men! Every resource the kingdom could spend! They could carry the pieces! They could search through the wreckage! But they couldn't make the broken thing unbroken again! [Verse 3 | pull back slightly, mandolin prominent] What if Humpty was a belief. Something somebody spent their whole life trusting until one terrible morning it stopped making sense. What if he was a marriage. Or a childhood. Maybe the idea that your parents were supposed to know what they were doing. Perhaps he was time. And if that's what he was then I understand why the king failed. Because nobody has ever built an army that can make yesterday happen again. [Bridge | half-time, acoustic guitar and bass] I wonder if Humpty ever looked down from that wall and knew he was falling. I wonder if there was one second between knowing and hitting the ground where he still believed someone could catch him. Maybe that's what the rhyme leaves out. Not the fall. The moment you realize the fall is already happening. [Final Chorus | driving full band, energetic but bittersweet] All the king's horses! All the king's men! They can hold the pieces in their hands! They can tell you where they came from! They can tell you how they broke! They can tell you what it might have looked like before! But they can't put it back! [Outro | acoustic riff, mandolin, upright bass] They never tell us what Humpty was. They only tell us he fell. And that after the fall even the king couldn't fix it. [Band cuts abruptly]
