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Last of My Kind

from When We Were Animals by Mishka Shubaly

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about

This is the first new song I wrote five years after quitting drinking. Okay, yeah, this is a dark song. When Beat the Devil broke up, I made some comment to our old drummer Mitchell about beginning my voyage into irrelevance. Obviously, I was wrong, as I usually am, but irrelevance is, I think, where we all end up, or at least most of us, or at least that’s what we fear, or at least that’s what I fear. Getting older has already been a motherfucker and I’ve only just started. I was thinking about Stanhope while I was writing this for some reason. He was quitting smoking and living in a tiny trailer on his property and trying to finish his book and I thought about him, rattling around in there at night like a bullet from a .22 rattles around in a skull. I was in England, doing some shows in support of Coward’s Path, the first record my friend Charlie Kennedy put out. He had given me this Taylor acoustic to use, a guitar far nicer than a hack like me deserved (and a far less plush guitar than the Atkin I’ve currently lucked into). He was convinced he was going to make me a star. I was convinced I was going to let him down. And I sure delivered on that… but Charlie’s misguided confidence in me is what made this record happen and I’ll always be grateful to him. I roped my friend Cait O’Riordan—the mighty Rocky O’Riordan of the Pogues!—to sing on it with me. At first it was backing vox and then it felt like a duet and now the song feels so transformed by her performance that it feels like her song that I sang on.

lyrics

It’s not that the heart has stopped beating
It’s just moved to marking time
It’s not that the lungs have stopped breathing
They still deflate and rise
Tear ducts micturate and dry
Nerve endings wither, calcify
It’s not that the body has stopped working
Like it ever had the choice to resign
It’s not that the cells have stopped growing
They’ve grown monstrous, they divide and divide
and divide and divide and divide
Your new body’s brighter and boring
How do you intend to excise all these vestigial organs?

I cannot change
I will not evolve
I am an artifact, I’m the last of my kind
You will encounter me in the pages of a textbook
Too scared to move ahead,
so stubborn I was left behind.
My tiny brain, buried in my thick skull,
I’m the last of my kind

I’m your payphone, your calling card, a tattered atlas
A relic, a curio, a useless artifact
Mixtapes and photo albums,
a late night long-distance phone call
This used to mean something but just what,
We can’t recall now.
Your world’s moving forward, yeah, it’s thriving
Where do you intend to bury this survivor?

credits

from When We Were Animals, released May 1, 2018
Cait O'Riordan on female vocals

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Mishka Shubaly Phoenix, Arizona

Shipwreck survivor, Jeopardy clue, bestselling writer, road dog on house arrest.

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