From the recording The One Thing You Need (2020)
“Take a Look Around” delivers a hard but hopeful message in an initially tough package that relents slightly into qualified affirmation. Once more the personal is spiritual, requiring an ethic of absolute accountability in both love and solitude. Things are as they are (“Take a look around, and you’ll see everything for what it’s never worth and what it is”) , a bracing reality that is both relentlessly engaging (“Nothing new is new to me”) and utterly existential (“If you free fall you fall for free”), and inexorably calls one to a reverence for the now (“You gotta take a look around, you gotta bend your own knee” ). Heaven once more is found in earthly revel and love, nuanced by human flaw: “You have little shoulders that I’d be standing on if I were not an angel on the run, so I fly, I leave heaven behind, I try, but it’s all in my mind.”
Written & Produced by Billy Webster
Lead Guitar by Carl Basler
Recorded at The Jersey Dream
(c) Shampoo Girl Music, 2020
Lyrics
Take a look around and you’ll see everything
For what it’s never worth and what it is
You can make a sound, you can have the ring
Take whatever’s mine and make it his
‘Cause I played the message back
You need a lot of things I’ll never lack
And if your heart plans a ground attack
You gotta take a look around
You gotta take your kiss back
Look into the sun, go beyond the moon
Look into the moon and you’ll see me
Waiting for the wind to knock me into it
I’m tired of getting the wind knocked out of me
‘Cause you stand and I can’t see
I said now nothing new is new to me
And if you free fall, you fall for free
You gotta take a look around
You gotta bend your own knee
I am getting over and you are getting on
And we are getting warmer in this sun
You have little shoulders that I’d be standing on
If I were not an angel on the run
So I fly
I leave heaven behind
And I fly
I leave heaven behind
And I try
But all it’s all in my mind
And I fly
I leave heaven behind