A funky ‘domestic epic’ abiut a highly tumultuous family unit, and the one kid who completely defies the precedent around them and becomes a very different kind of person. 

All songs composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars...

...except "I Was Reading in the March of Time", which features orchestral elements composed by Alex North, piano by Bill Evans and electric keyboards by Herbie Hancock...

...and "I Just Want to Make Jelly of the Stars", which features bass elements composed by Vignesh Dhileepan, and guest vocals by Yoshi....

...and "TravyonMarti", which is based on a theme composed by Zaytoven.

Our War and How We Won It

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics reproduced by the artist:

“I eat any bar that would use my family name
With the prejudice of caramel ”
My brother laughed at my display of rapperly flair
And the stars above applauded,
Upon the hill at night, he knew how to get through to me, simply
By refusing to treat this child like a child
And we’d catalogue everything in nature: the constellations;
Of what cheese the moon; a chorus of frogs, anything wild.
Perhaps alarmed by my tendency to vandalise
The chorus’ lillipads, dessicate habitats,
And my generally aggressive disposition, brother,
Master ever of the revealing question, asked “Say I could give
You anything; what do you really, really want?”
I said “I want to conquer everything in this galaxy I see,
Like our daddy would…”

"…I want to make mama out of mother
But a father out of dad
I want to punch the moon spinning
Through milky way and Mars bar
But most of all I just want
To make jelly out of the stars
And have a little wit, enough to spread it”

“Venus for academy, Mercury for a hunting ground,
And Mars for the party – no Mars a prison for villains
Whose villainy can’t be contained in earthly bounds”
So went the stops on my tour of the universe
Sat on the same hill with dad a while later, bro left behind,
I was engulfed with a silence he and I never encountered
The truths and laughs we shared that pulled the night
Close to hand seemed replaced by proof of our insignificance
Dad said not one word in dialogue, just a mantra, a missive from
A realm of gorgeous solipsism “Every person’s a world of their own.
The world is nothing but something to conquer and control,
No different from ourselves, and that’s why I tell you
Every person’s a world of their own, sunshine,”
He all-but cried, with star-yoking pride and the tear
Of a vision of ambition fulfilled both in his eye

He don’t know
Will never know
Couldn’t know
I just want to make jelly out of the stars

“Kiddo,” “Yes bro?” “Enough stargazing,
Time for a show of wit charblazing;
Freestyle for me”
‘I’ll dress you in that pewterous shine
True and luminous I intuited while red shoe’ing
Out of the uterus
Her soul opens to mine to mate
The dead weight of her ex abating
Words lurk behind my tongue waiting
So I can get all panegyrical unequivocal
Redeem those so vocal but not lyrical.’
“Very good, you’d leave llamas pack n Dalai proud,” he said
Massaging his wrists like from chains they’d just been allowed
“To rap the way you rap, think the way you think,
And give the way you give, is to be free”
My eyes wonderpaneled at these ideas as they took in too
His tender caress of those wrists, which he was fond of
Thrusting up, insisting “See these severed hands I wear round
My wrists, cut from a past that would not let go!”
Before those impressions, nutcrackers of my incomprehension 
Yielded rank to as sad a thing as I’d ever say
“If we’re born free,” I asked this figure brotherly,
“Why does it hardly ever feel that way?”

I Just Want to Make Jelly Of the Stars

Composed, performed, programmed & produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars and Alex North, featuring piano by Bill Evans and keyboards by Herbie Hancock

Lyrics reproduced by the artist

I was reading in the March of Time
A story that looked more than a little like mine
It captured my nascence in the shadow of wealth
Though not the abuse, or profusions of bruising from the belts
It spoke of how by the time I was 1 and 9 I’d graduated
Once less than thrice, but not how I’d also almost died twice
Then a passage it adored, how I took none
Of my magnate folks’ money, yet made a whole lot more
It told of material success, but not how I set off untold revolutions
Disguised in flesh, which took up whole souls’ purchase without incurring
Something so apparent as a minor disturbance,
Changed his society for no price higher than mild annoyance
In the one paper full of experts, and eager commentariat
An esteem for better news, an even-handedness known to few,
It was a not believable story; and, in being so, accurate and true
Believable? I never have been

Oh you will find if you go reading
Leafing through the March of Time
Reading through the March of Time
A story just like this

Every morning in the mirror I see
The guy who tried to murder me
Unsuccessfully, thankful are we both
That I had too much HP, and since then we
Have struck up a friendship of moving address
In a tame West; he alone knows all the secrets
Of who I was at the time we met, that my body
Then was my shadow, and my shadow the real me.
At least, thanks to him, I knew I was capable of action,
Of imposing myself upon the world, if only to curtail
Forever possibility of the same.
I don’t dwell in those Badlands, but lord knows I sent
A lot of thought miners into that memory’s thorny pass
From the rock came resplendent questions hewed: 
To escape the fate that made you, and shape your
Own nature: you don’t have to do this alone, or do you?
And why are the good who are also strong so few?

You will find if you go reading
Leafing through the March of Time
Reading through the March of Time
A story just like this
The story is the story of the good guy
And what he was made and betrayed by

There’s an awful lot the lens of that profile couldn’t help you see
Like the expression my brother’s ghost carved in the moon and
Which shines down on our mutual enemies; the cynical, deceitful,
The unmerciful virtuous, the deaf to reason, and broccoli.
Like the love, scarred, pierced beyond belief, that still drives me
Like the untameable mare of unthinkable truth I ride freely
Easy do we forget the full expansive glory of our story
So, at ease the March of Time, let me tell you mine
You may not like what I have to say
And find you like me anyway
At first the story of the good guy seems
Like you’re gaining in everyone’s esteem for gallantly walking green fields
Then all of a sudden boys of bones emerge from below 
To run through you, though they look like you do
You begin to recognise the villainy of friends
Soon you’re pitching through a hell of tortures oddly specific and unheard of
Which you’ll think not even the staunchest villain’d deserve
All this to create a good that will subject to all that evil throw at it
And not lose its nerve and cry
“Who’d ever want to be the good guy?”
The goods you pretend to will fall under wheel on our way
And rot in your renewed sight of them will many of the comforting beliefs you hold dear
If you take up rein and ride through the story with me here
How good is formed: the last tale anyone ever wants to hear

“A tree that would try to hide what it is
In the end will bear its fruit”, quoted on
The back pages of the March of Time
It prints your tale, it prints mine
“If we can learn from each other
A little more we’ll live forever”
Rich philosophies run in
This ink

I Was Reading in the March of Time

Composed, performed and produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars.

Lyrics reproduced by the artist:

He was my hero, though I took my sweet
Time to realise that; and he likewise that
My appearance on the scene was not what caused
Our parents fail to buy him a Happy Meal
Or love him back; aged three,
I remember looking at big bro with a look flavoured with
My first taste of the sherbet of condescension.
As he was absurded and upbraided by dad n mum,
I thought he looked like our postman, chained to his timetable,
Unable to escape it by rejecting its convenor,
No matter how blazingly evident his discontent.
Dripping tears, hopping on the spot, too humiliated
To do what he was told, too humiliated to not.
Seemed they despised him, would’ve coruscated him
As much had he revolted as given his obedience
His wit, his love, his patience would make him my hero then,
But the extent of his transformation made him my hero since

He was my hero
(There’s something about the way a hero breathes the air
I guess we’re gonna have to make one out of your somehow)
With love he stood defiant
My hero
How I wish that I could do
What he could do

Some selections from my brother’s little book of maxims
“A real insight’s as cold and smooth as gelato”
“No healthier culture than the pardo”
“There’s nothing scarier than the good guy, a good guy, a real good guy”

My bro – and everyone should know someone who
Does the same – loved to express himself
Through metaphors most oblique; a day ago 
I found the last one he screeted in an old filo-folio 
“Where I’m from, the rarest, greatest and only
Crimes are to be a heretic or a traitor
Of course I accrued the family’s stupor
Having done enough to be called both.”
He counselled me “You should always be yourself,
But only at certain times,” an insight probably
Derived from his extraordinary transformation; from
Urchin abused to urbane, merciful being of sane, retrieved grace.
When I’d vent red-faced about the fam he’d calmly say
“We are but posh monkeys, uncultured but with the stick
But don’t settle for anger, which makes the weak the sick, you see
If we will face only the misery and tragedy,
Not that much bigger beastie of onward hope,
Then we are but heroes in search of a defeat.
Write all these things down, bro,
You will understand them when you’re older,
Including those whose meaning evades me.”
Now as the insights mobilise and metastasise before
My eyes now realised, new mysteries I find have since risen
To take their place.

“That’s what music and lyrics truly are,
Two heroes pissing side by side
Like all great lovers, one day they will talk
And it will be for the last time.
Look at me, barely out my teens,” he said,
“And already I’m becoming afraid
Of how much I can identify
With this music; afraid I will fall
Asleep to it and wake up seven years
On, and the stars and the grass will be gone”
We stopped going up the mount after a while
I remember the last time, after we spoke of
Embossing flinging affluent malice and
Palestrina making a shack a palace, he told me
Of a song, “You know the one,” he said,
“That gossamer bark, steady as bread and
Bold as their secrets being offered up by the dead.
It’s the spectacle of a man walking live 
Across the threshold of the afterlife, 
Remaining alive to parse the entry to paradise
With his human faculties until his short term 
Of permission expires, and he must die 
To become of the paradise he has glimpsed.”

Heroes (in Search of a Defeat)

Composed, performed and produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

One Eye of Blue

Composed, performed and produced by Wavesword "Marsy" Mars

Lyrics reproduced by the artist

I was born in Ghetto’s Landing, that’s to say
The place to which the poor page upon receipt of their first wage
That weighs enough to make the migration
Where they transcend one prejudice
And often step right into the next one
Prejudice which to many provides their bar, to keep
Successive generations harboured at that degree, but which
Leads an intellect like my daddy’s, to the treasure
Of exploiter and exploitee
Dad had a genius for finding the weakness
In people; on every insecurity a plantation, 
Believed there was nothing so immortal as vice
That fortune founded better on no other foundation
And a Pharisee ‘gainst contrary prophecy, saying here was a world
That would never end before the middle classes to whom he sold sing

“I’m so sick of the things my money can bring
My monarchs don’t mean a thing”
And the hustlers cry
“Money I don’t have is the best kind”

But the man to cause me first distrust the coin
Was not dad, but his vivaciously rapacious brother,
Dubbed himself the artist’s model Jew,
Deducted a ducat of his pocket, flicked me two.
Uncle’s was obvious eff-oo-ach-you money, make-sexy-
The-Black-Paintings-of-my-soul money, make-mollified-
Being-overtaken-in-success-by-little-brother-and-
His-pursuit-of-my-wild-bride-money,
So thick with prejudice he would summon the snow
Just so that a darker night would be recast paler white
Unrivalled in what dad would tell me was man’s
Primary instrument of survival – the power to despise
Mean, they were, mean like only those who believe that
The only way to get all they ever wanted is to take it,
And it took me quite a while to completely cleanse myself
Of the desire to be, even a little bit, just like them

Having been disinherited by my parents
I did better than they ever did, and not just
For the fact that I now own a giraffe basketball team
Who, come to that, are second best in their one team league, see
Perhaps because I had the good ill-fortune to be raised in such a way
I came to distrust money, to hate a buck used for nothing sweet or right,
And because I grew up where the stuff was by the by and by
I was remarkably young and spry when first I had the opportunity
To grow sick of everything my money can buy
Because it was used to fill the absence,
Wetted with milk and stuffed in my mouth to stifle a cry; 
Because it gave me every precious metal,
Gated all hope beyond nascence, and bid my brother die, quick grew I
Sick of everything my fine money can buy, everything,
The dollars and the monarchs and the yen
Sick of everything my fine money can buy, everything,
The dollars and the monarchs and the yen
Everything, everything, everything
My money can buy
Everything, everything, everything,
Moola mia, moola mia

Everything My Money Can Buy

"Like a Dostoyevsky novel you can dance to..."

Baroque-hop, London blend

^)^

I Was Reading in the March of Time

Marsy Mars