Stay For Too Long (Peter O’Doherty) - For this song I borrowed from the titles to a couple of paintings by the American folk artist Andrea Heimer. Her narrative works about growing up in suburbia have long explanatory titles, so I paraphrased one called ‘In Our House and Others I Knew, Redecorating Was a Way to Force Change Without Really Changing Anything At All’ to set my first verse up and used another ‘a Feeling I Sometimes Have’ in the chorus. There’s a funny familiarity and poignancy about these paintings and I related them to my restless mum who had our family constantly moving house in a quest for something new.

Lyrics

Stay For Too Long
(Peter O’Doherty)
Inside of our house  And others I have known  We’d move around the furniture  Trying to change our home  But nothing ever changes  Unless we move away  We were always packing up our things We never seemed to stay  Stay for too long  Stay for too long  It’s just a feeling that I sometimes have There’s nothing on the radio  Nothing on the TV  Nothing in the garden  And nothing on the street  That we haven’t ever talked about  That we haven’t ever seen  Unless it’s in the moonlight  Unless it’s in our dreams  Stay for too long  Stay for too long  It’s just a feeling that I sometimes have Fixing up the rooftops  Mending all the fences  Patching up the potholes  Holding back the tide  And somewhere several streets from here
Or on the other side  The tracks the town the river too
Beyond the great divide
Stay for too long  Stay for too long  It’s just a feeling that I sometimes have
Just a feeling that I sometimes have