Korean Bird Paintings

Korean Bird Paintings
Album	New Asian Cinema
Released	1998
Artist	the Mountain Goats
Length	2:29
Previous Track	"Cao Dai Blowout"
Next Track	"Narakaloka"

Korean Bird Paintings is the second song on the EP New Asian Cinema. It also appears as the eighth song on the 2021 live album The Jordan Lake Sessions: Volumes 3 and 4.

Lyrics

Yesterday I put in a good five hours
Talking to the statues
Chased your memory all around the room
Didn't manage to catch you
But I cleaned out the savings account
Blew everything I had on flowers and I
Covered up the furniture in carnations
Rolled around for hours
And there are those of you who've got the wrong idea right now
But man, you should've seen me when I got through
Indistinguishable from a fourth century Briton
Waiting on the couch for you

And I put all the extras on the credit card
Mobiles of the galaxy and mylar balloons
Everything we'd saved up in one room at the same time
Cartoon stars and crescent moons
Thank you notes and get-well cards
Condolences, congratulations
Bright colors, hues and signals
Reminders and reverberations

Comments by John Darnielle About this Song

• "Everybody keep a good thought for this one that's never been played live. Uh, we got, um, uh, a bunch of requests, right, and, um, and I'll be ten thousand percent real with you, there were so many requests that I could have just written a set list and claimed that it was made up of requests, right, and cheated. But that's not my style. So I spent this morning, uh, and some of yesterday going through stuff and going, okay, that, I could never play that. And then I thought to myself, why not try, you know, we can try, we have cameras and memory cards and stuff, but not that many memory cards, so I better not do ten takes of everything. This one was hard to figure out, um, in part because I didn't own a tuner when it was recorded." -- 2021-04-18 - The Jordan Lake Sessions - Pittsboro, NC

Live Shows this Song Was Played at

• 2021-04-18 - The Jordan Lake Sessions - Pittsboro, NC