LISSA · NEUMAHN RECORDS
Only The Cold Knows
A single from Lissa.
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Behind the song
Liner Notes
In nineteenth-century New England, tuberculosis—then commonly called consumption—could devastate entire families. Not understanding the disease, some communities opened graves and searched the bodies of the dead for signs that they were somehow draining the life from the living.
Only The Cold Knows lets one of the accused speak. A woman's body becomes the answer to a question her frightened neighbors cannot solve, and their fear becomes justification for violating her grave. The song also speaks to a much older pattern: across history, women have repeatedly been made scapegoats for suffering, illness and social anxieties, branded as witches or monsters when the truth was harder to face.
The New England vampire panic was not directed only at women. But the song chooses a woman's perspective to ask who gets blamed when a community needs someone to fear. Its supernatural ambiguity is fiction; the historical exhumations and the desperation behind them were real.
Historical Background
Read more about the documented events that inspired the song:
Words & meaning
Lyrics
Lyrics by Douglas Petercsak
Frost is heavy on the windowpane They whisper consumption is eating my brain My family wastes like a dying flame While the village physician forgets my name They say my skin holds a suspicious glow Too warm for the winter, too cold for the snow
Underneath the frozen soil, am I sleeping sound Or walking through the midnight frost above the quiet ground They say the dead stay down below Where winter winds blow cold So how is it my secret pulse Is still a story told
They lifted the lid in the biting march air To look for the monster they fancied was there They found liquid crimson still bright in my chest And called it a sign I refused to find rest Was it nature preserved by the ice and the chill Or a hunger that death couldn't manage to kill
Underneath the frozen soil, am I sleeping sound Or walking through the midnight frost above the quiet ground They say the dead stay down below Where winter winds blow cold So how is it my secret pulse Is still a story told
A heavy heart, a burning spark Cut from my chest out in the dark They sought a cure to make him mend And turned my story to a bitter end
The smoke goes up The ashes fall Did I wake up Or not at all Only the cold knows Only the cold knows