Winter Song

The song that’s sung (badly) on the book trailer for The Red Man and Others had several sources of inspiration. A friend said it was nice that we got Tom Waits for the soundtrack. Not wholly inaccurate; Waits has this rustic/rusty quality I aimed for, as if some folklorist of yore had found some old men in a pub on some godforsaken island, got out his reel-to-reel and started taping.

The best example I have of this, and what was at the forefront of my mind, is Í Gøtu ein dag from Eivør Pálsdóttir’s self-titled debut. I understand it’s a traditional song from her native Faroe islands. Eivor’s got one of the greatest voices around, and we hope that she’ll visit Belfast one day, so we can see her live. Meanwhile, we’ll make do with the live recording of her The Swing tour, which we had on repeat during a fair bit of the writing of our collection, in particular The Red Man.

There’s another live track where Eivor uses a thumb piano. As we’ve got one too, I decided to use it on our track. Missing a bit of a beat to tie the track together, I then used a cardboard box as simple drum. When we heard the result, both Angeline and I had the same thought: The Wicker Man. And why not!

I’d taken the lyrics from the story in The Red Man and Others, where it was a prayer to the god of Winter-to-Come, with some extra lines added at the start. Then I timed the result, and found it ran too long for the animation, so cut the middle lines out again. This is the fullest version of the song:

Winter, winter come to me
For thy helpmate waits for thee
Winter, winter, stay with me
Play thy courtship patiently
Winter; will you take this bride
To wed and rule the countryside
(Chorus)
Of moist and soil your love will grow
Underneath your cloak of snow
Let her seed creep in the ground
There to wait, new life to found.

We wanted to make it a song that was very earthy yet poetical, and an acknowledgement of winter in the cycle of life. It’s so different from the ballad sung by Ymke’s father and the Red Man a bit later in the story, of which we only wrote a few lines of the chorus:

And weren’t we merry and filled with joy
When at last we were united
Our lips met each others’ and hands clasped together
Our passions forever ignited

(RvS)