[Verse 1] I grew up where the river runs brown beneath the bridges and the mills, Where the houses lean a little but the people mostly don’t. Where your grandfather could tell you which old building used to breathe, Which gate he walked through every morning, which machine took half his hearing. There are churches on the corners, there are bars beside the tracks, There are saints behind the glass and there are names carved in the bricks. There are stories nobody wrote down because everybody knew them, Till the ones who knew them vanished and the buildings went with them. So I started writing things down. Not because I thought they’d save us. Just because somebody should. [Chorus] I believe in rust and ruin, I believe in things half-seen, In the stories people carry And the places in between. Give me ghosts beneath the streetlights, Give me monsters in the trees, Give me one good local legend And I’ll live inside the dream. [Verse 2] I like fairy tales with dirty boots and gravel in their teeth, Not a castle on a mountain but a ranch house by the creek. Give me witches in the hollows, give me saints beside the road, Give me something scratching circles where the February weeds don’t grow. Give me old men at the counter saying, “My uncle saw it once,” While somebody rolls their eyes and somebody else says, “No, he didn’t.” That’s the moment that I love most, somewhere halfway truth and joke, When the room goes slightly quieter and nobody quite goes home. Because everybody’s laughing, But they’re listening just the same. And that’s where all the good stuff lives: between belief and being ashamed. [Chorus] I believe in rust and ruin, I believe in things half-seen, In the stories people carry And the places in between. Give me ghosts beneath the streetlights, Give me monsters in the trees, Give me one good local legend And I’ll live inside the dream. [Verse 3] Around here we learned early you don’t wait to feel inspired, You get up, punch in, do the thing, and bitch about it when you’re tired. You fix what’s broke with what you’ve got, you make it last another year, You keep your coat until the zipper goes and then you fix the zipper. So that’s how I learned writing. Not candles. Not muses. Not some sacred bolt from God. You put your ass down in the chair and you work with what you’ve got. A sentence with a bad wheel. A paragraph that won’t behave. A story stalled beside the road you swear to Christ you’re gonna save. Take it apart. Find what’s wrong. Put it back. Carry on. Turns out steel towns teach you something about making things that last. [Bridge] And yes, I know the mills are mostly gone now, And yes, I know nostalgia lies, It sands the edges off the hard years and puts sunset in the sky. But I’m not trying to resurrect them. I’m not praying for the past. I’m trying to hear what people whispered while the world was changing fast. The story underneath the story. The dream underneath the dirt. The thing your mother wouldn’t mention. The thing your grandfather heard. A light across a soybean field. A woman walking where there’s no road. A child who buried something small and wouldn’t tell you where it goes. You can call it superstition. You can call it make-believe. I’ve never cared much for the difference if the story makes you see. [Verse 4] Some nights I sit there after midnight with the whole house gone to sleep, Writing rivers, woods and weather like they’ll answer back to me. Writing fathers, writing daughters, writing bodies in the mud, Writing God into the darkness just to see if God shows up. And maybe that’s the dream of it: not leaving where you’re from, But finding all the hidden doors inside the place you thought you knew. Because I’ve driven past these houses for most of thirty-some-odd years, And still I swear some nights the porch lights look like signals through the trees. Still the Mahoning keeps on moving. Still the freight trains shake the glass. Still somebody tells a story that survived the person who passed. And I want to be there when they tell it. I want to get the damn thing down. [Final Chorus] I believe in rust and ruin, I believe in things half-seen, In the stories people carry And the places in between. Give me ghosts beneath the streetlights, Give me monsters in the trees, Give me one good local legend And I’ll live inside the dream. [Build] Here’s to stories told in kitchens. Here’s to names nobody knows. Here’s to things seen from a truck cab on some empty county road. Here’s to mothers, mills and monsters. Here’s to saints and missing teeth. Here’s to every half-true story that somebody chose to keep. Here’s to making something useful from the scrap that you’ve been given. Here’s to working for the story. Here’s to dreaming while you’re living. [Outro] The town keeps changing. The river runs. The old men leave. The stories don’t. So write them down. Write them down. And live inside the dream.
