Lyrics to
While The City Sleeps

This version of While The City Sleeps was released by Chicago in 1972.

Visit the Chicago Lyrics profile at Decade Lyrics - it has the While The City Sleeps lyrics as well as the rest of the songs by Chicago.

Here's more interesting things in songs and lyrics tied to Chicago or about the 1970s in general.

While the city sleeps
Men are scheming
New ways to kill us
And tell us dirty lies
While the city sleeps
Earth is crumbling
Everyone talking
And doing not a thing
While the city sleeps
Men are dreaming
A world enlightened
Beyond this darkest age

---

Want more lyrics and songs by Chicago?

Chicago has released many songs over the years besides While The City Sleeps. Chicago released songs from 1969 to 2006 spanning across albums like The Chicago Transit Authority, Chicago (Chicago II), Chicago III, Chicago V, Chicago VI, Chicago VII, Chicago VIII, Chicago X, Chicago XI, Hot Streets, Chicago 13, Chicago XIV, Chicago 16, Chicago 17, Chicago 18, Chicago 19, Twenty 1, Night & Day: Big Band, Chicago XXV: The Christmas Album, and Chicago XXX. Decade Lyrics has over lyrics & songs by Chicago.

If you're a fan of 1970s songs looking for more songs from 1972 or the 1970s overall, you've come to the right place!

About Lyrics and While The City Sleeps by Chicago

When you decide to study the lyrics to While The City Sleeps, you're looking at the words, verses and background chorus from the 1972 song by Chicago. Some of the lyrics to While The City Sleeps have clear meanings and some contain metaphorical references. Like most songs, only Chicago and their collaborators know the full story behind any of the their songs.

You can understand the lyrics to While The City Sleeps if you take apart the structure of the words. The word "lyric" itself derives from the Latin word lyricus, with the actual English word lyrics applied to the definition "words set to music" listed in Stainer and Barrett's 1876 Dictionary of Musical Terms. Continuing the chain, the Latin word lyricus derives from the Greek word λυρικός or lyrikós. This somewhat means "poetry accompanied by the lyre" or "words set to music." You can easily see that by looking at the background of the word lyric, that the "lyrics to While The City Sleeps" means the words set to the music of While The City Sleeps, or poetry accompanied by the lyre played by Chicago. The singular form "lyric" is still used to mean the complete words to a song. However, the singular form lyric is also commonly used to refer to a specific line (or phrase) within a song's lyrics. Hence, by this analysis of word structure, you could say that the lyric to While The City Sleeps and the lyrics to While The City Sleeps are both one and the same thing. None of this talk about the word Lyrics is really relevant to fans of Chicago who came here looking just for the lyrics to While The City Sleeps, but we feel it is still fun to learn what's behind commonly used words and lyrics in songs.

More Songs & Lyrics by Chicago

Visit our Chicago profile for more Chicago songs, lyrics & info!

)