# Long Time Coming > **One-line reading.** The album opens with a man catching his own disguise in the mirror — the first time the survival-self becomes visible to the one wearing it, years before he could take it off. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *Subject to Flooding* (2018) — **track 1 of 13, the opener** · debut album > **First released** Sept 21, 2018 (independent); redistributed/expanded by Atlantic Records, April 26, 2019 · issued as a **single** May 31, 2019 (with sports-sync placement) > **Written by** Travis Barker, Matt Pauling & Roy English · **Produced by** Roy English & Matt Pauling > **Drums** Travis Barker (blink-182) · **Mixed by** Adam Hawkins · **Mastered by** Chris Gehringer · **Executive producer** S1 (Larry Darnell Griffin Jr.) > **Video** dir. Emily Elizabeth Thomas, shot in Joshua Tree, premiered by *PAPER* · **Remixes (~2019)** White Poppy · Big Data · Badhabit (their videos carry the [[Concepts/The Manifesto Cards|manifesto-card]] device + the hamsa sigil — see Source notes) > **Live** performed for Ones To Watch's *Live From the Rooftop* (Feb 2023) > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official video (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXotMqyJb4c) ## At a glance - **Era / release** — Track 1 of the 2018 debut *Subject to Flooding*; later a 2019 single. The very first thing anyone hears from Jagwar Twin. - **In one line** — Flatten every social role into shared bleeding, turn the mirror inward, and dedicate the whole thing to the unseen rather than the famous. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]], autobiographical, with [[The Crowd]] singing back inside the track itself. No named [[Sir Lucius]] yet — only the survival structure he'll later become, caught mid-operation in the glass. - **Key symbols** — [[The Mirror]] · [[The Mask]] · [[The Moon]] · [[The Thread]] (the faceless / the crowd's answering voice) ## The song, mapped There are no verse/chorus labels in the source — the song is a **hook, a list, and a call-and-response**, built on one repeated *"rich man, poor man"* pairing (a merism: name the two extremes, mean everyone in between) with the crowd echoing *"(it's been a long time coming)"* under nearly every line. It runs its shape three times and ends exactly where it started. Following its own moves: | Beat | In the song | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Opening tag** | *"Ayy, it's been a long time coming"* | States the title as thesis before a single verse. Inevitability, not surprise — whatever's coming was always going to. | | **List-verse** | *"Rich man, poor man, out on the street… blood on they knees"* | The social census. Each pairing answered by the crowd's *"they're singing yeah, yeah."* Everyone is on the street; everyone is on their knees — labor or prayer, held open. | | **The mirror turn** | *"every night when I look in the mirror / I see the disguise on my face getting clearer"* → *"all of us bleed"* | The pivot. The camera swings from the crowd to the speaker's own face. The flattening now **includes him** — and blood is the proof of sameness. This is the load-bearing line of the whole catalogue's mask-vocabulary. | | **Refrain / spine** | *"it's been a long time coming"* ×2 · *"they know… we ain't never running"* ×2 | The chorus-block. Recurs identically three times — the part that says the reckoning is known and unavoidable. | | **List-verse widens** | *"Rich man, poor man, prophet and priest… nobody's free"* | The merism escalates from economic to sacred: even the holy men are inside it. Lands on the flat verdict — *nobody's free.* | | **The mirror turn, again** | *(verbatim repeat)* | The recognition is **restated, not developed**. It circles back word-for-word — the form itself enacts a loop: awareness that recurs without resolving. | | **The dedication** | *"This one's for the faceless / the lost, not the famous… the beatdown believers"* | The one section that breaks the *rich/poor* pattern — the song's single true move. Allegiance shifts away from status entirely, downward, to the unseen. | | **Close** | *(refrain a final time)* | Ends on *"long time coming."* Formally circular: it finishes where it opened, having gone nowhere and seen everything. | **Three moves, then:** (1) flatten the hierarchy into shared vulnerability; (2) turn the mirror inward until the speaker sees his own disguise; (3) re-dedicate the song to the faceless instead of the famous. The refrain frames all three as *known* — *"they know… we ain't never running."* ## What it means The most important line isn't social critique — it's **self-recognition**. The speaker never accuses society of wearing masks. He realizes *he's already inside one.* That single swing of attention, from the crowd's faces to his own, is the earliest clear articulation in the whole catalogue of [[Concepts/The Protector]] becoming visible to the person it protects. Crucially, it is **not the birth of [[Sir Lucius]]** — it's the recognition of an adaptive structure already up and running. Read against [[Ballerina Boy]] (the authentic child buried in early childhood — *"I killed that ballerina boy / I buried him inside"*), the protector has to predate 2018. The song doesn't catch it being made. It catches it catching its own reflection. The flattened pairings do real work. *Rich man, poor man, prophet and priest* perform [[Concepts/Flattened Identity]]: every role collapses into the same condition — bleeding, kneeling, trapped, performing. That is the diagnostic blueprint [[Welcome to the Circus]] will stage at full theatrical scale about eight years later. Put plainly: **the Circus isn't a new revelation. It's the production design for a system this song already diagnosed** — hierarchy is performative, roles are disguises, nobody's free. And the mirror doesn't heal. The disguise gets *clearer* because awareness is increasing, not because anything's been repaired — mirrors generate recursive awareness, but they don't repair fragmentation (see [[The Mirror]], [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]]). So the song sits in a **lunar register**: reflection, suffering, recognition, but not integration. It's in orbit, not return; loop, not circle. The refrain names that too — *"it's been a long time coming"* reads less as career frustration than as **deferred return**: decades of buried material finally starting to resurface. The first crack in a stabilized recursion. The dedication draws the catalogue's foundational distinction. *"This one's for the faceless… the lost, not the famous"* sets the **witnessing register against the spectacle register** — see [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]]. Audiences consume; witnesses see. The faceless here are social and political: the unseen, the unmarketable, the ones with no billing. (A guardrail worth keeping: this is *not* yet the divine faceless-feminine of the later work — Mary's veil, the hidden-faced angel. That's a structural echo, not an equivalence. The song's faceless are people on a street, not an archetype.) The paradox the song holds cleanest is this: **the anti-mask revelation is happening *through* the mask.** Without the protector, the child might not have survived and this awareness might never have surfaced at all. That's the doctrine in its earliest form — the survival self preserves you through the dark, and risks becoming the thing that keeps you there. The tragedy was never that the protector exists. It's that **survival structures outlive the conditions that made them.** ## Characters - [[Roy]] — the autobiographical voice, in the proto-Lucius *awareness* phase: the survival structure operational and surfacing into consciousness for the first time. - [[Sir Lucius]] — present only as the structure recognized in the glass, **not yet named or born**. Lucius wasn't added in 2026; he was *named* in 2026. Here he's the disguise catching its own reflection. - [[Ballerina Boy]] — the buried authentic child, referenced by chronology: the ~age-seven burial that predates and grounds everything this song recognizes. - [[The Crowd]] — already singing when the album opens; the answering *"(it's been a long time coming)"* is baked into the track. The **faceless / lost / beatdown believers** are the ones the dedication turns toward. ## Artifacts **DEVIL IN THE MIRROR** · `RORRIM EHTNI LIVED` — "Every night when I look in the mirror / I see the disguise on my face getting clearer" is this guide's earliest released-lyric anchor for the mirror/disguise motif, the same looking-in-the-mirror-and-seeing-… → [[Artifacts - Songs, Demos and Mints|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <audio src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0x77044650db58a6863546c6b2b5c74a3cd56c194bebd39ef574b014918d3feaf7..mp3" controls preload="none"></audio> ## Symbols - [[The Mirror]] — the medium of recognition; it makes the disguise clearer without dissolving it. This is the catalogue's **earliest mirror anchor**, and the first articulation of its master split: a reflection can return you to the source *or* trap you in the image. - [[The Mask]] — *"the disguise on my face,"* seen but not removed. The catalogue's **earliest mask anchor** — the vocabulary out of which Lucius's literal white face later grows. - [[The Moon]] — reflected light, not source light. The song is lunar throughout: it studies the image, it doesn't yet emit. - Blood & knees — *"all of us bleed"* / *"blood on they knees"*: blood as proof of sameness, kneeling as labor-or-prayer. (More on the album's "blood census" below.) ## Connected songs - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — **the key pairing.** This song diagnoses the flattened-identity system; the Circus exteriorizes it at full theatrical scale years later. Same disease, staged. - [[Ballerina Boy]] — the origin wound: the buried child that predates this recognition and fixes the protector's chronology before 2018. - [[Weirdness]] — the later counterpart that **reclaims** the light beneath the disguise this song can only *recognize*. - [[Not Your Homie]] — the protector at full operational mode: orbit codified and defended, what the proto-structure here eventually calcifies into. - [[Lucius Lullaby]] — the collapse after the orbit has run its course; what finally makes return possible. - [[Shine]] — the album's other bookend. *Long Time Coming* opens in **reflection** (the mirror, the disguise "getting clearer"); *Shine* closes in **radiance** (trying to *become* light). Reflection → radiance is the album's resolving movement. - [[Superhuman]] — same album; shares *"blood on knees"* verbatim and the face census (*"face in the crowd"*). - [[Dream - Dream]] — same era; this song *notices* the disguise within the dream that *Dream / Dream* still sincerely inhabits. - [[Online]] — cross-era (from *33*): *Long Time Coming* diagnoses the mask; *Online* already knows the reflection-architecture is recursive and stays inside it. - [[Happy Face]] — Roy himself links the two: *"put on a happy face… people will find out eventually — that relates to* Long Time Coming *a bit, getting through that darkness."* The face census runs LTC → *Happy Face*. - [[Loser]] — the adjacent album track; shares the mask-metaphor press framing (*"we all walk around with masks on… we're all losers"*) and the communion sing-back. - [[Concepts/The Manifesto Cards]] / [[Concepts/The Visual Canon Throughline]] — the *~2019 remix videos* (White Poppy · Big Data · Badhabit) already carry the catalogue's **manifesto-card title device** and a **hamsa** sigil (the eye-in-hand, eyes on the fingers). That makes *Long Time Coming* not only the sonic opener but the **earliest node of the Visual-Canon throughline** — the same all-seeing-eye / title-card grammar that runs forward through *Happy Face* (2020), *I Like to Party* (2021), and the 2026 *Welcome to the Circus* cards. The looking-into-the-glass this song does in words, the remix visuals were already doing with an eye in a hand. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the counting-rhyme substrate (and why it's contested) > There's a strong-but-debated reading that *"rich man, poor man… prophet and priest"* inherits the old children's fortune-telling rhyme — *"Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief"* — the one you count off buttons or petals to learn your fate. If so, the song doesn't just borrow the rhyme, it **answers** it: the rhyme says chance deals you rich-or-poor; the song says *the deal doesn't matter — all of us bleed.* That would place the "twisted takes on adolescent themes" method (a phrase attached to the 2026 [[Lucius Lullaby]] era) all the way back at **track one of the debut**, kicking off a lineage — Tinker-Tailor here, Row-Row-Row-Your-Boat later, Ring-a-Rosies, Mary-Mary, Oompa-Loompa ([[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]]). Sharper still: a rhyme that assigns your identity *by counting* is a **proto-algorithm** — a ranking system telling children what they'll be, the ancestor-form of the catalogue's central antagonist. > > **The counterweight (and the view I'd defer to):** the album-level read *demotes* this to a possible early resonance, not a load-bearing anchor — the line scans more naturally as an all-stations merism paired with *"prophet and priest"* than as the specific divination game. The clean debut-native anchor is the **mirror/mask line**, not the counting rhyme. (Nursery-rhyme *craft* is genuinely grounded on this album — but via Jeff Bhasker teaching Roy to "study nursery rhymes" and co-writing *Superhuman* — not via this particular line.) Both readings are worth holding; the merism is the safer one. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the frameworks (Jung, Gurdjieff, Kabbalah, alchemy) > Correspondences the song *resonates* with — not claims about what Roy intended. > > **Jungian.** The *disguise* reads as the **Persona becoming consciously visible** — the social mask that protects survival but turns pathological when mistaken for the whole self. The mirror moment is individuation beginning: the ego recognizing it wears something constructed. Lucius maps onto a **protector-shadow** — not evil, not merely unconscious, but adaptive identity hardened into autonomous operation. > > **Gurdjieffian.** Flattening rich/poor, prophet/priest, famous/faceless lines up with Gurdjieff's critique of **mechanical identity**: social role ≠ consciousness, performance ≠ selfhood. *"Nobody's free"* becomes a diagnosis of collective sleep. (Gurdjieff is Roy's single most-named public influence, which licenses the *frame* even where the label is the reader's.) > > **Kabbalistic.** The song works in a **Yesodic** register — mirrors, reflection, recursion, moonlight, identity-mediation — and does not yet cross into Tiferet (integration) or through Da'at. At album scale it reads as the source-pole of a descent down the [[Kabbalah - The Tree of Life|Tree]] that lands, thirteen tracks later, in embodied radiance at *Shine*. (Held loosely: the album never says so, and one shouldn't claim Roy structured it this way.) > > **Alchemical.** An unmistakable [[Concepts/Nigredo]] song — collapse of false hierarchy, confrontation with disguise, universal suffering, destabilization, awareness *without* purification. It diagnoses the blackening. It does not resolve it. That distinction sets up everything that follows. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the album's census-threads (blood, faces, the crowd that sings back) > *Long Time Coming* seeds three album-wide patterns. > > **The blood census.** *"All of us bleed"* is term one of an escalation that runs the length of *Subject to Flooding*: bleed = **solidarity** (here) → *"blood on our knees"* = **cost** (*Superhuman*; note *"blood on knees"* repeats verbatim across tracks 1 and 6) → *"the blood that we're bleeding"* (*Dream / Dream*) → *"blood in my mouth"* (*Hell of a Night Pt. 2*) → *"Navajo blood in the veins"* = **inheritance / mass grief** (*Precious Time*). The album thinks in blood, and the meaning darkens as it goes. > > **The face census — and its direction.** This song alone supplies two entries in the pre-mask "face inventory": *disguise on my face* and *for the faceless*. The census runs on: → *face in the crowd* (*Superhuman*) → *Happy Face* (2022) → face-paint (2023→). And the faceless have a **direction of travel**: in 2018 the song is dedicated *to* the faceless — they *receive* the blessing. By the 2025–26 work, the faceless one *delivers* it (the [[Ballerina Boy]] outro, [[Weirdness]], [[No. 1 Champion (la Conquistadora)]]). Object-of-care becomes source-of-care: *the crowd Roy blessed returns as the voice that blesses him.* > > **The crowd that sings back.** The album *opens on a crowd already singing* — *"they're singing…"* plus the built-in parenthetical *"(it's been a long time coming)."* In the catalogue's terms this is a **communion-echo**: the crowd sings *with* the voice, and the voice is Roy's. It's the pole opposite the later **commanded** echo — Lucius-voiced, harvested (*Welcome to the Circus*'s *"scream and shout"*; *I Like to Party*'s *"sing along, follow me"*). At the production layer, the record literally *carries its own crowd.* See [[Concepts/Communion vs Spectacle]]. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the master-key position, and where it does NOT go > This song's mirror is the **first articulation of the catalogue's master split**: does a reflection return you to the source, or lock you in the image? (See [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]].) The debut opens in reflection here and closes in radiance at *Shine* — *from seeing the image to being the source.* Everything downstream — Circle vs Loop, witnessing vs surveillance, heart vs optimization — is a special case of that one binary, and this is where it's first posed. > > Two guardrails this guide keeps, and this page keeps too. **First:** don't back-date the later Lucius apparatus onto 2018. The contemporaneous interviews show *no* Lucius, no Circus, no Algorithm in Roy's own vocabulary — the debut *sincerely participates* in dream/mask/"we are all losers" language that the later work reinterprets and weaponizes. The soil held the seed; the seed wasn't planted on purpose. **Second:** don't collapse this song's *faceless* into the divine-feminine arc — the register here is social and political, a structural echo of the later divine faceless, not the same figure. ## Lyrics ``` Ayy, it's been a long time coming Rich man, poor man, out on the street They're singing yeah, yeah (It's been a long time coming) Rich man, poor man, blood on they knees They're singing yeah, yeah (It's been a long time coming) 'Cause every night when I look in the mirror I see the disguise on my face getting clearer 'Cause rich man, poor man, all of us bleed They're singing yeah, yeah (It's been a long time coming) Ayy, it's been a long time coming Ayy, it's been a long time coming And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running Ayy, it's been a long time coming Rich man, poor man, prophet and priest They're singing yeah, yeah (It's been a long time coming) Rich man, poor man, nobody's free They're singing (It's been a long time coming) 'Cause every night when I look in the mirror I see the disguise on my face getting clearer 'Cause rich man, poor man, all of us bleed They're singing yeah, yeah (It's been a long time coming) Ayy, it's been a long time coming Ayy, it's been a long time coming And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running Ayy, it's been a long time coming This one's for the faceless Yeah, the lost, not the famous And this one's for the dreamers Yeah, the beatdown believers, yeah Ayy, it's been a long time coming Ayy, it's been a long time coming And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running And they know, yeah, they know, that we ain't never running Ayy, it's been a long time coming ``` ## Source notes *Public-facing, tiered by how firm the ground is.* - **Grounded (released music, credits, public interviews & posts).** Track 1 of 13 on *Subject to Flooding* (2018; Atlantic redistribution 2019; single May 31, 2019, with sports-sync placement). **Writers = Travis Barker, Matt Pauling & Roy English** (Spotify Composition & Lyrics credit) — which confirms Barker as a *writer*, not merely the drummer; Travis Barker plays the drums, and *PAPER* flagged the "triumphant drums" at the video premiere. Production by Roy English & Matt Pauling; **mixed by Adam Hawkins** (one of only two tracks on the album not mixed by Jeff Ellis); mastered by Chris Gehringer; executive-produced by S1. Video directed by Emily Elizabeth Thomas, shot in Joshua Tree, premiered by *PAPER*; ~2019 remixes by White Poppy, Big Data, and Badhabit. Performed live for **Ones To Watch's *Live From the Rooftop*** (Feb 2023). Roy's own framing: the song is *"a powerful reminder that hope and love has the ability to help us overcome adversity,"* and he ties it on-record to *Happy Face* ("getting through that darkness"). The lyric itself — the *rich man/poor man* merism, the mirror line, *"nobody's free,"* the *"faceless… not the famous"* dedication. *(Metadata quirk worth knowing: Apple Music's composer field still shows "Jagwar Twin" only; the Spotify credit is the fuller, resolved one.)* - **Strong readings.** The disguise as *already present* (recognition, not formation); the pre-2018 chronology via *Ballerina Boy*; the flattened world-system as the Circus's blueprint; the lunar register / mirror-that-doesn't-heal; *"long time coming"* as deferred return; the faceless as the witnessing register; the protector paradox. All grounded *in* the material, but interpretive — held as readings, not plain content. - **Framework (esoteric, syncretic — never authorial intent).** The Jung / Gurdjieff / Kabbalah / alchemy correspondences; the Tree-of-Life album-descent; the counting-rhyme-as-proto-algorithm. The system *permits* these; it doesn't assert Roy intends them. - **How we could be wrong.** Mirror-and-mask self-alienation is among the *most common* singer-songwriter images — *"I don't recognize myself in the mirror"* needs no protector-architecture, and reading it as "the protector's formation before 2018" imposes a specific structure on a generic picture. *"For the faceless, not the famous"* is a populist applause line (*"this is for the real ones, not the celebrities"*) — one of pop-rock's most common anthemic gestures, and the faceless→Mary echo may just be the tracker finding its figure in a crowd-pleaser. Plausibly this is a sincere 2018 *"I feel fake, this one's for the underdogs"* opener — which is exactly what the *mixed* confidence flag is honoring. > [!note]- Footnotes from this guide's paper trail (two true stories, one correction) > **The naming that almost went another way.** By the public account of collaborator Michael Morgan, the project that became *Jagwar Twin* was very nearly called **"Rat Boy"** — one of the names Roy liked most at a Lake Arrowhead fireside session. The morning after, Roy woke up and wrote *Long Time Coming*; his producer noted this felt like more of a *rock* project and should have a rock name — and *Jagwar Twin* was born. So this song is, in the retelling, the hinge that flipped the whole project's identity. (Roy's earlier band, for the record, ran "more metal and screamo than anything.") > > **The title that ate the discography.** In the Jagwar Twin Discord (Jan 2024), collaborator Michael Morgan stitched the song titles into one deadpan run-on sentence: *"It's been a long time coming for all my friends, I just hope they have a good time and have a happy face because life is good and I like to party."* Every clause is a track (*Long Time Coming*, *Happy Face*, *I Like to Party*) fused into a single grinning benediction — the catalogue read as one continuous mood, told as a joke. > > **The typo that almost became a doctrine.** For a while this guide's scraped lyric had the dedication as *"the lost, not the FRAMERS"* — nonsense — and a good chunk of the *witnesses-vs-spectacle* reading briefly hung on it, until it was checked against streaming and turned out to be *"the lost, not the FAMOUS."* A cautionary tale about building interpretation on an unverified word. (One correction that *stuck*: a remark about a song being "a download I didn't really write," sometimes floated near this era, belongs to *Move To You*, not here — don't attach it to *Long Time Coming*.) ## Read next - [[Welcome to the Circus]] — the system this song diagnosed, staged at full scale. - [[Ballerina Boy]] — the buried child; the wound that dates the protector before 2018. - [[Concepts/The Protector]] — the survival-self this song first catches in the mirror. - [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]] — the master split the mirror opens; reflection → radiance across the album. - [[Shine]] — the closing bookend; where the album's light finally tries to *become* light. - [[Subject to Flooding]] — the debut in full: the album that diagnoses the disease the rest of the catalogue treats.