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 the 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 couple 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 (x 4)