Heirloom
Memoryhouse Lyrics

The lyrics to Memoryhouse's song Heirloom are rich with poetic imagery, offering a meditation on memory and the passing of time. The opening lines, "Between a state where years collide / And we can just lie still, waiting for the day to spill" suggest a sense of suspended animation, a moment of stillness in which past and present merge. The phrase "waiting for the day to spill" creates an image of time as a liquid substance, pouring out of a container and saturating the moment. The next line, "And watch the light slowly arrive, pressed against my eyes / Tracing all your lines, slowly" conjures a pastoral scene, with the warm glow of sunrise illuminating a landscape and highlighting the contours of a loved one's face.

The refrain of the song, "Lie on the ground before the lightning strikes / Just don't drown in the flood," is a warning against the destructive power of natural forces, using the violent imagery of lightning and flood to convey a sense of danger and urgency. The second verse continues the theme of temporality, with the lines "Been weaving threads between our names / A pact to carry on, in case this all goes wrong / When we were sleeping through the years / The days all seemed far off, until the sky swelled up / Slowly." Here, the imagery of weaving suggests an attempt to knit together disparate strands of experience and memory, in the hope of creating something that can endure even when everything else falls apart. The final question, "Can we survive without measured time?" may be read as a plea for a world beyond the constraints of temporal expectations and social norms, a space where love and connection can exist outside of the strictures of clock and calendar.