When I was a kid I grew up in a house on a hill
Not the top, not the bottom, but the middle
And I still remember where I cracked my head
In the vacant lot, there's a row of tiny houses there now
And we used to light fires in the gutters
And I could cool my head on the concrete steps
But the girl down the street hit my sister on the head
With a stick and we hid behind my father
As he knocked on the parents' door
To tell them what she did
But the parents were drunk so they really didn't give a shit
And the girl down the street said a dog couldn't bark
'Cause a man with an axe cut its voicebox out
But my older sister told me that it prob'ly wasn't true
And I believe what she said 'cause she took me by the hand
One time when a coupla men drove down the hill in a white van
Said there was a phone box filled with money 'round the corner
And I woulda gone along but she took me by the hand
To the house in the middle of the hill
In the middle of the hill, in the middle of the hill
And my mother knew the words to a lot of different songs
And we'd always sing the harmonies, yeah we'd sing along
She had cold, cold hands when the fever hit
And then the noises that the trains
Made sounded like people in my head
And the stories that the ceiling told
Through the pictures and the grains in the pine-wood boards
And let me stay outside 'til the sky went red
And I could cool my head on the concrete steps
And you could never really see the top from the bottom
But I don't pay enough attention to the good things when I got 'em
And you could never really see the top from the bottom
I don't pay enough attention to the good things when I got 'em