Conor Oberst
Four Winds
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There's people always dying, trying to keep 'em alive
There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where

A squatter's made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair

But when great Satan's gone
The whore of Babylon
She just can't sustain
The pressure where it's placed

She caves

The Bible's blind, the Torah's deaf, the Qu'ran is mute
If you burned them all together, you'd get close to the truth still
They're poring over Sanskrit under Ivy League moons
While shadows lengthen in the sun

Cast on a school of meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It's knocking over fences, crossing property lines
Four winds, cry until it comes
And it's the sum of man
Slouching towards Bethlehem
A heart just can't contain
All of that empty space

It breaks
It breaks
It breaks!

Well, I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, "You'd better look alive"

And now it's off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the black hills, the badlands, the calloused east
I buried my ballast, I made my peace
Heard four winds leveling the pines

But when great Satan's gone
The whore of Babylon
She just can't remain
With all that outer space

She breaks
She breaks
She caves
She caves