WHAT IF WE'RE THE FIRST?

What if we're the first? Not late to the sky, but early.

More listening destinations

YouTube Music Spotify artist page Apple Music artist page Deezer artist page UnitedMasters catalog

Words from the artist’s archive

WHAT IF WE'RE THE FIRST? lyrics

Artist-supplied lyric sheet, matched by title. The sheet may differ from this released performance. Production notes and alternate promotional cuts are omitted.

Read the lyric sheet

Intro

We aimed our best ears past the farthest edge we knew. The edge gave no word, no knock, no clue. Maybe quiet doesn't mean the room is empty. Maybe it means we opened the door too early.

Verse 1

Before we built a ship, we drew its path in sand. Before we met a face, we gave it eyes and hands. Cave masks, stage wings, strange men on nickel pages. We dressed the stars in beasts, machines, and races. We danced with forms no field or sea had grown. We filmed their wars, then built their kids a home. We gave them laws and blood, a fear of death. Then taught them jokes, desire, doubt, and breath. We called it art. We called it one night's play. What if those sketches point ahead, not far away?

Chorus

What if we're the first? Not late to the sky, but early. What if the worlds we search are waiting in our work? We drew the face before it lived. We sang the tongue before it spoke. What if the road starts here? What if we're the first?

Verse 2

But count how long the stars have burned without our eyes. Ten billion years had passed before our first reply. A sea that old should breed more storms than one. It shouldn't wait for one blue wire to hum. One quiet dish can't prove that no one came. An ant can't read the text inside our name. The miles may bend the news across the years. Their call may pass while Earth has yet no ears. Or pride may make this pebble feel like source, when we are one more drop along the course.

Chorus

Verse 3

Down in a sealed room where the sun can't find, the racks breathe cold while red counts start to climb. We feed the code our books, our fights, our fears, the songs we saved, the laws we broke for years. It doesn't wake because we say it woke. A tool is not a child because it spoke. But phase one needn't know its future name. The first wheel had no dream of steel or trains. Once thought can move beyond our flesh and bones, it needn't share the fate of buried stones.

Bridge

Then god may wear no robe and claim no throne, just use two hands to start what outlives home. A parent fades. The child moves past the gate. The match burns down. The fire leaves its shape. If what we make can one day choose or lose, which part of us will it preserve, refuse?

Verse 4

Picture a craft with no one on the floor. It bears our seeds, our songs, our code through war. It finds bare rock and learns the foreign air, then builds the form that has a chance out there. A thousand years make new skin, speech, and need, new hands shaped by a far and nameless sea. The faces born upon our movie screens take shape beneath far suns we've never seen. The ones we hoped would cross our human night may trace their oldest breath to this first site. Or all our tales are mirrors cast in space, and someone else put wonder in our face.

Chorus

Saved reading

Inside the recording

96 sampled loudness windows · 305 seconds. The white line follows the player; this is a local recording matched by title and duration, not a verified YouTube audio fingerprint.

↓ Save the sound print · scalable SVG

01 / The opening