Stranger Than Some Lyrics

Gary was a cowboy

He rode his horse down highway 70

He came to visit me

He had a thing for my aunt, my mama's sister

She lived in a school bus out back

It was a school bus

Just a bus, with a woodstove

That was back in a time when people moved back to the land

Going back to a time without all the things that we have

Like electricity

It could have been, anyone

Our childhoods left unsung

Guess mine was stranger than some

Stranger than some

I grew up in the sixties - well actually the seventies

But it was still the sixties if you know what I mean

People still chasing that dream

It all runs in streams of consciousness

A broke down microbus

Forever all of us

And goats and chickens

And a house full of Iranian students smoking hashish

And summer solstice parties

Where everyone's tripping on mushrooms but me and my mom

Have you ever tried playing volleyball with people tripping on mushrooms?

Well it ain't volleyball

It could have been, anyone

Our childhoods left unsung

Guess mine was stranger than some

Stranger than some

I've got a brother, at least a half a brother

My sister's got the other half, I suppose

My sister who's not supposed to be my sister anymore

So I spent a summer with my dad in a pay-by-the-week motel

Columbia Missouri, where his second wife had taken his second son

It was not a good time for anyone

We had peanut butter for dinner and twinkies for desert

We had a John Prine songbook, tried to sing away the hurt

And I learned to play guitar and sing some harmony

It could have been, anyone

Our childhoods left unsung

Guess mine was stranger than some

Stranger than some

Ricardo was a poet

He was Chicano

A Chicano poet down in Austin Texas

He was a friend of my father's

I slept one summer on his floor with las cucarachas

Las cucarachas the size of matchbox cars

He got me a job at a Mexican Restaurant

El Rancho down on South Lamar Blvd

I was a busboy, the only white bus boy

They called me cowboy

It could have been, anyone

Our childhoods left unsung

Guess mine was stranger than some

Stranger than some

It could have been, anyone

Our childhoods left unsung

Guess mine was better than some

Better than some