[ Verse 1] He arrived with a suitcase and a notebook full of ghosts, Berlin was burning somewhere between the bars and broken hopes. He watched the strangers dancing, he watched the century turn, with a camera for a conscience and a heart that wouldn't learn. [Chorus] Isherwood, Isherwood, standing where the shadows stood, writing down the dying light as if words could make it right. Isherwood, Isherwood, every city understood— you were only passing through, but the world was passing too. [Verse 2] Auden at the station, winter underneath the wheels, every friendship had a future and every future had its heels. The nightclubs glittered brightly, while the dark came through the door, and somewhere in the distance history began its war. He wrote of men and women with their masks and borrowed names, of hunger dressed in evening clothes, of love that played at games. And he carried Berlin with him across the ocean, through the years, until California sunlight couldn't quite erase the tears. [Chorus] Isherwood, Isherwood, standing where the shadows stood, writing down the dying light as if words could make it right. Isherwood, Isherwood, every city understood— you were only passing through, but the world was passing too. [Verse 3] Then the camera turned inward, and the watcher watched himself, took the dust from off the mirror, put the ghosts back on the shelf. A single man at evening, with the Pacific at his door, still listening for the footsteps of the people gone before. And if the world was changing, he would write it as it passed— not the heroes in the headlines, but the strangers holding fast. For the truth is sometimes quiet, and the witness sometimes sings, while the century goes marching with its iron wings. [Chorus] Isherwood, Isherwood, you saw more than a camera could, all the beautiful disasters, all the saints and misunderstood. Isherwood, Isherwood, turn the page and there you stood— half a ghost and half a guide, with the twentieth century walking at your side.
