Snowbird was just a little girl once   All tangled up in dandelion hair and polka dots   And a picture book mind full of dreams and designs   And visions of faraway places      Yeah, she drew underwater worlds and cities in the stars   In the Asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars   In felt tips and crayons her little works of art   All promised a future of greatness      She caught the sunlight in her eye   Underneath the winter sky   "I'll paint the world until I die", she said   "One day I'll spread my wings and fly high like a snowbird"      Yes, I will      Her daddy died when she was only ten   But all she cried came out in ink and in pen   She drew charcoal streets leading down to dead ends   Where heads hung low in sorrow      But she was left a small fortune at the reading of the will   About enough for a life and then another life still   And with her mother in a haze of vodka and pills   Snowbird had just dreamed of tomorrow      She caught the sunlight in her eye   Underneath the winter sky   "I'll paint the world until I die", she said   "One day I'll spread my wings and fly high like a snowbird"      Yes, I will   That's right      Years went by and she hit eighteen   And left home for the art-school scene   To paint the people of the shadows and the faces unseen   For her hero was now Egon Schiele      But she did a couple of little canvases and bad super 8   And a conceptual piece that was thirty years too late   It was all she could fit between the dinner and the dates   With dreamers and drummers and dealers      She caught the sunlight in her eye   Underneath the winter sky   "I'll paint the world until I die", and she said   "One day I'll spread my wings and fly high like a snowbird"      Yes, I will      Well, who's that girl in the little black dress?   Her head held high like a real princess   A glimmering, shimmering, coked up mess   A fashion trash, art school failure      Yeah, her fingernails are all there's left to paint in her world   She dishes out the dirt with the party powder girls   Who think love comes in diamonds and wisdom in pearls   And art is just paraphernalia      She's lost the sunlight from her eye   There's only a mirror ball left in her sky   "I'll do what I want till the day that I die   Now see me spread my wings, I can fly high like a snowbird      Snowbird was just a little girl once, she was   Snowbird was just a little girl once   Snowbird was just a little girl once, she was   Snowbird was just a little girl once but now she can fly