'The Buried Heart'

Recorded in Manchester, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire: September 2022 – March 2024.
Released: 7 June 2024

Rory Sanger – all instruments and vocals, songwriting, production, ambient sounds, mastering
Artwork design by Sam Sanger
Drum kit provided by Morgan Poole

The Buried Heart

'Bee's Knees'

Syncopated breathing as I stumble down the street
Motorik fear receding into paranoia like
A saudade sea, heavy as la gran tristeza
I'm fending off tears with a foreign mantra
Bad memories weren't welcome at my reincarnation
But I'm still a psychologist's field day
Stunned into a silent film, keys rattling in the smoke
Hanging out the window, seconds from death below

I slept to the soothing sounds of sofrência
But soon I awoke
And decided on a whim that true love is the greatest scam
This world has ever seen

Why don't I accept this as the bee's knees?
It's real love without the insanity
The station crossing is your meditative sea
Let it catalyse all your lucid dreams

You hold a different kind of kind words
that infuse in the creases of my midnight mind
Closing time through the June night
The unparalleled haze of your guiding light
You keep me grounded in the things I already knew
You help me heal my heart for somebody true

But once you've gone, the streets sow new dreams
Once dormant seeds that only now morph into
A butterfly with heavenly magenta wings
Wrapping silk around my mosaic wounds
She crafts me a garland of olive leaves and
Lets it wither at the gates to my ashen heart

She flies in with a volcanic heat that
Melts my deserts down to tropical seas
Tearing up my blind anchors and numb sorrows
Oh at last, I can feel everything!

Why won't I accept this as the bee's knees?
It's real love to cure the insanity
The station crossing is your meditative sea
Let it catalyse all your lucid dreams

She just shakes my heart like a...

Manchester, 2023.

Bee's Knees

'Pink Boats'

Maybe this time I want to be marooned and let the tezeta turn sweet
Close the windows of my mind, the softening of time, the mellow line
How romantic is a one-off coffee trip? It's barely a blip in my heartbeat
It seems I'm tired of offering more than my soul can hold

But I feel safe watching all your pink boats go down
Flushed over the waterfall into a pale, green lake
While I contemplate all the remarkable things I can achieve
If I never fall in love

Buried pains of the ancient past have purified this water
From which I scoop my bottle of emotional intelligence
It's full to the brim but I'll never find someone to share it with
So I pitch it over the cascade; the breeze, she will find a way to you

And I hope I feel safe watching all your pink boats go down
Towed over the waterfall into a calm, blue lake
While I contemplate all the remarkable things I can achieve
If maybe I just don't fall in love

What if I'm not safe watching all your pink boats go down?
Washed over the waterfall into a warm, rose lake
While I contemplate all the remarkable things we could achieve
If you ever fell in love with me

Manchester, 2023.

Pink Boats

'Sagrada Cicadas'

Mi corazón sanará
Y me verás prosperar
Sé que no la encontraré,
Espero que no importe

Mi corazón sanará
Y me verás prosperar
Porque ya lo enterré
Muy lejos de este lugar

Barcelona, 2022.

Sagrada Cicadas

'The Expatriate' (Parts I–II)

At the end of my tether with the weather
July drizzle diluting my coffee
Rooting my desire to fly away
Boarding the slowest train
Raindrops swimming on the window pane
Each as unlikely as a million blue moons
Crashing through the ceiling to swoon
Over me, the only survivor, finally free

Oh believe me, by now I would've fled
Had my heart not become a shooting star of soft lead
I always envisioned my lover's face fading in an hourglass
Because like me she knows it's impossible to even start
A global game of hide and seek for two
Where the continents don't drift in the way that they used to
So I can play no part
I will play no part
Can't you see there's no place for me
And I will play no part

Granada, 2023.

The Expatriate (Parts I–II)

'My Lover's Eye Is a Metronome'

Queen Sofía, tell him if this rabbit hole leads
To the metronome on the gallery horizon
Cruising carefree over singed poems that cry
Macho acid rain aloof onto her corrugated roof

One freak android stares through the smoked glass
At a graceful nebula of limbs and broken harp strings
Opera resonates around the paper walls of her chateaux
The reel of flashbacks rolls in her circus airglow

My lover's eye is a metronome
Some people cry when they're all alone
But I concede as I'm set in stone
The needle carves my black heart of bone

Such a desperate privilege for me to breathe the same air
In which you kissed him on your long weekend away from my
Daydreams of your invite to the rhapsody in pink
So how could I have not stopped thinking about you since?

I'm a fool to fire a good heart at the pendulum
But I’m sick of singing love songs that make me lose my voice
Or fighting the sign that reads 'no pleasure beyond this point'
The metronome explodes; my emotions are bankrupt now

How many years of bad luck just for breaking the ice?
Because I've run out of oxygen to swoon over your paradise
How did I come to bear this fruit of a tasteless tree?
Remind me of the booking fee for dying alone

My lover's eye is a metronome
Some people cry when they're all alone
But I concede as I'm set in stone
Her perfume dissolves everything he's known

Madrid, 2022.

My Lover's Eye Is a Metronome

'The Expatriate' (Parts III–V)

I crash-landed in the Andes and upset the tectonic plates for you
In the amber cabin dawn, I sculpted a naked swan in my sleepless blur
She was swimming through the charcoal mist on a warm lake of bedsheets in royal blue
She's setting sail for a brighter haven, so I'll haul my islands to the other ends of the Earth

Mi coronita, mi estrella de la mar, si supieras que
Me darías tu cielito si fuera verdad lo que me dijeron
Mi amor, si no nos seguimos en el bosque dulce y oscuro,
Nuestra sangre no fluirá del rojo más puro

You rush barefoot through the vineyards of my citrus daydreams
The heat haze blessing the grapevines with your soft perfume
You chase the butterfly with my veins of ink through her treasure map wings
She leads you to the olive tree, you kneel down and dig my ancient roots
Your amber necklace leaves the valley of your heart to brush the baked earth
Where my buried heart sleeps in a box, kissed with your little crowns and wreathes
Rejuvenated, coronated by your yearning hands, at last you have found me
Then flow your tears of joy as you realise it's you, my love, it always has been

If you only knew how many millenia I have waited for
This life where you are forever my ocean and I am your shore

El Chaltén, 2023.

The Expatriate (Parts III–V)

'Helium Plumes'

You come to me in shades of sapphire and mauve fire weaving through our electric embrace
I’m weeping through the maple leaf walks, shivering without the glowing hearth of your grace
Inconsolable with galaxies of tears, each of them a love letter never to reach your heart
How I yearn to gift every last word to you, instead I'm crying out for your hand through the dark

At dusk, I rush to the heart of your rose garden and surrender to your regal helium plumes
From my freefall, you catch me in your dahlia hands, let my body be your trellis for their blooms
Soft laurel in your cedar hair and warm sighs that crystallise me in the cradle of your arms
The shimmering threads of your stars wrap themselves up like ribbons around my driftwood heart

Ascending in pearl clouds as our wavelengths align, your incense shrines whisper burning sentiments of bliss
My fingers feel your necklace chain, the silver heat of your neck and Merlot lips that I crave to kiss
Saffron butterflies escape from your heart and fill up the windows of your cinnamon eyes
Your loving gaze fuels this velvet ache that sinks into my inner sea of nectar and brings me to life

On your rooftops where hot air balloons hover in crocus flames, I yearn to cry out your classical name
I am silenced by your sweet roasted chestnut silk smoke that overwhelms the hissing citrus rain
So I fall to my knees shaking with desire, cherishing this eternal ritual in bittersweet blue
Until the euphoric moment that you blush in technicolour when I say 'How I adore you!'

Manchester, 2023.

Helium Plumes

Neon Groves is the psychedelic music project of UK songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer, Rory Sanger, formed in 2018.