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Memory Can Kill
Music + lyrics by Peter King
3:09 | :30 soundbite

This song speaks plainly enough, and you’ll understand if I keep my comments discreet.

But let me just say that I went to college for several years at Penn State’s main campus. My memories of the place involve impossibly cold, impossibly beautiful nights deep in the midstate countryside, where the air was clear and the sky held a million stars.

In the town of State College, snow piled up on the alley fire escapes and garbage cans. Inside worn but often-elegant old student apartments with big doors of dark wood and beviled glass, warm lights glowed from behind window shades and cheap lace curtains. There (as they’ve always done and always will) young men and women wooed each other with naivety and passion.

It snowed all night
The town was silent
We climbed up College Hill
Sliding on the glittering sidewalks
Memory can kill

And in her one room
We took our pleasure
We took it with a will
The rumble of the salt trucks passing
Memory can kill

Bridge:
And in the morning
The sun streamed in
The world was clean and new
She showed me
A poem she’d written
And every word rang true

And since that day
I haven’t seen her
And yet I see her still
The moving years are dangerous
And memory can kill