Circle Protector from Circle Breaker by The Taxpayers

The day before Circle Protector was written, I ran into my friends Katie and Will, who were loading an amp into the back of a car about a block from my house. They were heading to a house show in the next neighborhood over. “You should come,” they said. But me and Elise had free tickets to see the stage adaptation of Alanis Morisette’s 1995 album Jagged Little Pill and babysitters for our six month old (our first date night in months), so we hopped back on our bikes and told them to have fun. “Maybe we’ll stop by after the musical.”

I found out the next day that there had been a shooting at that house show. Some random guys had wandered in thinking that it was a house party, tried to hit on a few people who weren’t interested, and opened fire on their way out. An old friend had been killed, a victim of a stray bullet.

I learned about this as I held my sleeping baby in my arms, grappling with the fact that my friend had been murdered a handful of blocks from where my baby slept. That night, I lit a bundle of old dried lemongrass and walked a protective circle around my home.

The next day we walked down to the banks of the Mississippi River, said a few words, and tossed a leaf into the water in my friend’s name. The current took the leaf around the bend, from Minnesota to Iowa and Illinois and Missouri and Arkansas and Mississippi and down past New Orleans, until it finally shot out into the Gulf of Mexico and beyond the grasp of our grotesque nation, a speck in a vast ocean on its way to god knows where.

Tracklist

1.	Circle Protector	4:02

Videos

Lyrics

Take all the people that I don’t know yet
And put em in bottles that you can protect.
Flash burn their living to my memories
That float down the river out into the sea.
That float down the river out into the sea.
Tell all the senseless events to be gone,
Give all the naked a place to belong,
Take all the brokenness, place it on leaves,
That float down the river out into the sea.
Circle my son. Circle my home.
Circle my planet and all that is known.
A circle protecting, enriching within.
Endlessly ending to always begin.
Endlessly ending to always begin.
Tell all the senseless events to be gone,
Give all the naked a place to belong,
Take all the brokenness, place it on leaves
That float down the river out into the sea.

Credits

from Circle Breaker, released March 21, 2025

License

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.