From the recording Eat Your Heart Out (2018)
"Beautiful" is so, well, beautiful. It's great and even necessary to hear this angelic incarnation of your voice, much as I also enjoy and admire its more robust expression of recent years. They complement each other, and it's nice to have such range and be able to use it to serve the expression. I so admire your courage in speaking directly about deep and difficult things, like love in all its nuance and stages. There is some great poetry in this song, "truth like water stains the hands of sentiment," "even though I've read this book the end is a surprise," and the chorus, with its affirmations, is just so lovely. It really lingers with me, a kind of mantra.
- Ethan
Written & Produced by Billy Webster
Lead Guitar by Carl Basler
Recorded at The Jersey Dream
(c) Shampoo Girl Music, 2018
Lyrics
Two children found a friendship
Wrestled it and held it down
And threw it in the water
Just to see if it would drown
And don’t you feel the pressure deep within things?
The surface, still floating
So heavy, so strong
Amazes me the way a smile cheap disguises pain
Envious and generous, he turns around again
Threatening himself, afraid to love another man
Beautiful and strenuous, the way he holds his hands
Two children torn away from
The very things they tried to hold
She lies to someone else now
I wonder why I never told
The truth like water stains the hands of sentiment
Of ridicule, of sympathy
I never said, I should have said
Listen to her whisper, pulls her baby to her breast
Primitive and elegant and I forever guess
Turning to the rhythm of the woman in her eyes
Even though I’ve read this book the end is a surprise
And she says to me…
Don’t forget the children or the man
The things that cannot be and those which can
They’re all important, beautiful
She’s beautiful, he’s beautiful
It’s beautiful to me