What Do You Hear In These Sounds

Dar Williams

I don't go to therapy to find out if I'm a freak

I go and I find the one and only answer every week

And it's just me and all the memories to follow

Down any course that fits within a fifty minute hour

And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent

When I hit a rut, she says to try the other parent

And she's so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,

But she knows that its much better if I get it for myself...

And she says



What do you hear in these sounds?

What do you hear in these sounds?



I say I hear a doubt, with the voice of true believing

And the promises to stay, and the footsteps that are leaving

And she says "Oh," I say, "What?" she says, "Exactly,"

I say, "What, you think I'm angry

Does that mean you think I'm angry?"

She says "Look, you come here every week

With jigsaw pieces of your past

Its all on little soundbytes and voices out of photographs

And that's all yours, that's the guide, that's the map

So tell me, where does the arrow point to?

Who invented roses?"

and...



What do you hear in these sounds?

What do you hear in these sounds?



And when I talk about therapy, I know what people think

That it only makes you selfish and in love with your shrink

But oh how I loved everybody else

When I finally got to talk so much about myself...



And I wake up and I ask myself what state I'm in

And I say well I'm lucky, 'cause I am like East Berlin

I had this wall and what I knew of the free world

Was that I could see their fireworks

And I could hear their radio

And I thought that if we met, I would only start confessing

And they'd know that I was scared

They'd would know that I was guessing

But the wall came down and there they stood before me

With their stumbling and their mumbling

And their calling out just like me, and...



The stories that nobody hears, and...

I coll