Defiance, Ohio Is the Name of a Band

Lyrics

Defiance, Ohio is the name of a band And the thing is that they are from Columbus, Ohio Which is confusing to folks on the East Coast when I tell them about the time that they played for four hours at the Newport and it was raining outside But me and everyone I knew still locked arms after the show and walked down High Street singing "Oh! Susquehanna" at the top of our lungs til some dive bar security threatened to kick all our asses And he had twenty pounds on all of us combined and Defiance, Ohio plays folk punk which pretty means that sometimes they let a banjo or a cello crawl into bed with the screaming and all their shows feel like they were made just for you And Jeff plays guitar for them and makes singing look effortless And I guess it is, kind of because all their fans know all the words to their songs and they sing them so loud it's like the band doesn't even have to And their fans are often cloaked in tattoos and trucker hats and ironic hand-me-down shirts from old car garages or little league baseball teams and they jump on each others backs at shows and scream in each others faces and it's like familial, I guess or I guess it is most times And one time at this show I saw a dude with straight edge tattoos knock out some dude who had an entire school of fish inked on his arm and so okay It's certainly not always familial And when the guy with the fish tattoos hit the floor someone from the band stopped the music and said "hey listen don't come to a Defiance, Ohio show and fight cut that shit out hold hands with each other or some shit" Which is funny to say coming from a band who put the song "I Don't Want Solidarity if it Means Holding Hands With You" on their first album which was a fine album but it had a little too much acoustic noise for my taste Defiance, Ohio is a real town in Ohio and the band is not from there And anyone who is from there either leaves or dies And in the summer of 1794 General Mad Anthony Maine ordered a fort be built at the ? of the mountains in Alglaze Rivers in Ohio and when it was done a soldier from Kentucky named Charles Scott stood in front of the fort and said, "I defy the English and all the devils of Hell to take this" And that's how the fort was called Fort Defiance and how a whole city spilled around it by 1904 And that city was also named Defiance And the site of the fort is a library now or at least that's what I've been told And me and my pals would drive up to Defiance, town every now and then when we were old enough for adventure but too young to properly wallow in the depths of Columbus' scene And we would go to Bud's Diner and we would flirt with the waitresses And sometimes we would drive down the backroads screaming the words of some punk dirge out of the windows of a car we had to have back in someone's parents driveway by morning And sometimes we would take out mailboxes with a baseball bat And one time a man ran out of a house with a Confederate flag hanging from the porch and he chased us down the road calling us outside all of our names And my buddy Derrick said he swore he saw the man holding a shotgun and so we stuck to the fears of our own city from that point on And the second Defiance, band album came out in 2006 and it was called The Great Depression And it nearly started an honest revolution in my little corner of heartbreak and I barely made it through 2006 alive cause we had to bury Tyler and Marissa too And in the song Condition 11:11 there are the lyrics I remember in the kitchen, when you told me your grandma died That's when I realized it gets worse And it does It does get worse It is really something to remember that you can actually be alone And so when the band sings Here's to this year I never thought I'd make it through I put my arms around someone else who did make it and swayed along as a clock swung itself past midnight at the end of December And I saw Defiance, band in another sweaty room in '07 And everyone there was sad So no one was into fighting that night And the band with the cello and the band with the banjo strings stood thick and heavy in the air No one seemed to mind It's like if we all try hard enough in the same room Everyone can remember what it is to lose somebody at the same time And Defiance, town is awash with heroin now And I see it on the news A man nodding off in a car and two people overdosing in the same night And 27 people dragged to the town jail in a drug bust Is the kind of town that will hold you under its tongue ready to swallow you whole And they found the body of a kid who used to come up to Columbus for punk shows and ? in Defiance, town apartment And his body was surrounded by spent lighters and he was at the Defiance, band show where they played Grandma Song and everyone put up their cellphone lights but the true punks put up lighters and waved them and the band sang Do you come from a dead people? And Defiance, town is dying off like all of Ohio's other towns that feed the bigger cities in both food and those who escape And in the Defiance, town paper I read a story about the heroin epidemic And the headline said: we will not let this destroy us and above it is a picture of a mother pulling her young daughter's frail body close to her chest in front of a worn-down house And in her eyes is a determination And in her eyes is daring all the devils of hell to come take what is hers and I thought about what it must be like to name yourself after a town that's become a ghost factory and play songs about surviving a haunting And Defiance, band hasn't made a record in six years and the last one sounded like they were trying to get out of each other's way Then I heard they played some Indiana dive last spring And I heard the pit was wicked And later that week there was another drug bust in Defiance, town And there are times -- I guess --destruction is not as much of a choice as we think it is and man, I barely made it out of 2006 alive And in the Defiance, band song "Oh! Susquehanna" the chorus that everyone sings goes And I wonder what did they do with the bodies And I wonder what did they do with the bodies And I wonder what did they do with the bodies and I wonder