Song Description
Note: I plane to make a carefully directed video for this
Raise the Fourth (A Drop from the Fourth) is Isla at her most exposed. She's singing from that narrow edge between thought and action.
The lyrics unfold like a confession in motion, describing the build-up to a suicide that never happened, told as if it did. Each line drifts between clarity and disassociation, mapping how the mind rehearses its own absence.
It isn’t a song about death, but about recognizing what could have been. A the moment of seeing how close it came. Raise the Fourth is both survival and witness, sung in the tense between falling and staying.
Between leaving ones self on the cutting room floor and a mouth(hinge), that just won't stop singing.
Lyrics
Fluorescent bruise on the ceiling, hum, hum
Receipt rain on the footpath, drum, drum
We don’t use names, only handles, only doors
Raise the fourth, cut the room, leave the hinge singing
I run my tongue along a crack in the light
Counting wrong on purpose so the floor feels right
Three three, then two two two
The crosswalk clicks like it knows what I’ll do
Your paper smells like wet sandstone air
You draw a stair, I climb it nowhere
No hymns, only alarms that forgot to stop
I say open, bite the O in half and drop
I don’t pray,
I calibrate the static in my teeth
I don’t stay,
I lean into the turn until it speaks
Raise the fourth, cut the room, leave the hinge singing
Bright knife, bright knife, hold, then thinning
If the door won’t answer, I’ll become the ringing
Raise the fourth, cut the room, keep the hinge singing
Tunnel reverb teaches my whisper to shout
Fast food clatter says in, and I choose out
Bridge ribs arch like a whale that forgot the sea
I tag each column, they forget me
Shoes slap puddles like bad applause
Sirens comb the air for reasonable cause
I rhyme the gutters with my under breath
Down tuned neon, quarter inch from death
I don’t pray,
I bargain with the meters in my bones
I won’t sway,
I keep the wrong count like a throne
Raise the fourth, cut the room, leave the hinge singing
Bright knife, bright knife, hold, then thinning
If the door won’t answer, I’ll become the ringing
Raise the fourth, cut the room, keep the hinge singing
Glass on stone, low cloud in the mouth
We stop, but the city moves south
Your finger writes melody on fogged museum skin
My skull rings once, the night rings in
I am the misprint that makes the line stay
I am the handle that hides the way
One, two, three, four
One, two, three, bar falls short
Not a crash, not a scream, just the city clearing its throat
I’m mid note, mid step, mid nothing, cut to mote
You’re half a street away with paper ghosts
I’m standing wrong while the quiet boasts
We rehearsed this ending without a script
All the way back when the first light tripped
Raise the fourth, air rips
Cut the, thin hiss
Hinge keeps, pulse, pulse
Singing
Time stretches thin, shows bone through skin
Pigeons walk like priests, the crowd leans in
I want to say okay, my mouth won’t lift
I offer you the rule like a final gift
Raise the fourth, cut the room, barely
Leave the hinge singing in the vacuum
If I stop, the city keeps running inside my chest
If I run, the city stands still, doing its best
What won’t resolve is the part I keep bringing,
The hinge falls sweet into ground, still singing
Raise the fourth
Cut the room
Hinge keeps singing
After we’re gone