Rabbit rabbit rabbit!

Welcome to August, 2020.

Songs for Saturday: The Stolen Child, For Amy

A few days shy of thirty years ago our second child, Amethyst Rose, was stillborn. It wasn't until a dozen years later that I wrote a song "For Amy" ([ogg] [mp3]); you'll find the lyrics and audio at the link, and in the set of memorial songs I posted last November on Día de Muertos, which fell on Saturday that year.

I think part of the reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" was that I'd already written something that worked for me -- a setting of Yeats's poem "The Stolen Child" -- sometime in Augusong st of 1990. I'd heard at least one other version; I've heard several more since. I latched onto the poem at once -- it was really too obvious for me not to have noticed. But the tunes I'd heard had a problem: they were too delicate and cheerful. I suppose the faeries would think so.

So I wrote my own, mostly in D minor. (Am capo 5, to be precise -- that was the only set of chord shapes that had the right combination of minor and suspended chords within easy reach.) The first three lines of the chorus, though, are in D major. What child wouldn't want to walk away "with a faery hand in hand"?

The only recording I could find of my version of "The Stolen Child" is one of a set of scratch tracks for what was meant to be my second CD, Amethyst Rose, and which I apparently abandoned some time in 2010. I suppose I ought to get back to that sometime. Sometime soon, preferably. But I'm not making any promises -- I know better.

The other reason it took me so long to write "For Amy" may be that I was already well into my series of prose poems posted on Usenet, and later LJ and DW. In particular, the one from 1991, which already includes the central images I would later use for the song.

( lyrics, if you don't want to click through: )

Look for another post on Tuesday, August 4th.