FAWM: "Travelling Late"

Travelling Late

2025 by @ttg105

Liner Notes

The chorus, as explained by Wikipedia: “Elm do grieve, Oak do Hate, Willow do Walk, if Yew travels late” is an old English folk rhyme that warns travelers to be careful when walking near trees at night. The rhyme may also refer to the properties of the trees themselves. Explanation Elm: After a bacterial infection, elm trees can weep a dark, sticky liquid that leaves tear stains. Oak: During dry spells in the summer, oak trees can suddenly drop limbs. Willow: Willow trees layer their limbs where they touch the ground, making it easier for them to walk than yew trees. Yew: Yew trees layer their limbs where they touch the ground. Purpose The rhyme may have originated from pre-Christian paganism. It may also be a simple recognition of the trees' properties.

The rest of the lyrics are just a round-up of lyrical chunks that I jotted down this month but never used. The "orange sky" is a reference to you-know-who.

Lyrics

"Elm do grieve, Oak do Hate, Willow do Walk, if Yew travels late"

Planets drop out of tumbling skies and stars smolder and sizzle and the clouds dissolve in the hands of a frustrated god who swipes the world away with his right hand and curses life with the left so stick with the old and out with the new tongue-tied trio back with two birds, silvery words and a slippery raccoon the redbird and the dead words

Skullbone riders and rapidly rising rivers of woe and the sky flies open and the sun runs away and the gathering of the gloaming and the roaming and the crumbling plains and unraveling skies and the stars shooting far out of the heavens

The eleven horsemen - the Norsemen - sitting in Valhalla singing Viking ballads and building salad cabins in the forest and the rabbit that dug a hole at the edge of a glowing world of flowering herds of stars that harvest the maelstrom the whirlpool the school of wishes in silk shores and the middling moors of meddlesome slumber under an orange sky

Comments

@ambroise 2025

I like the drone sound that make it sound like a chant from some himalayan monastery. Makes sense with the lyrics sounding like a vision or a halucunation occuring during a trance. My favorit amongst these visions is the eleven Vikings building salad cabins.

@billwhite51 2025

winner of fawms most astounding vocabulary of speculative imagery, a multiverse of surrealist worlds connected by four trees on planet earth. i have never heard of these tree attributes before, as i am hung up on the tree alphabet that makes up the calendar of the white goddess. and so i am always happy to learn something new on subjects of interest. i came away from this song with a feeling about why poets love alliteration and why critics of poetry hate it. and finaly, the music here is way different from your bass-driven. this one could almost get you onto the edm vip list.

@sbs 2025

At first I thought we had some bagpipe thing going on. I’ve been watching too many shows set in Scotland - lol! I agree with @freshspotlessyouth - who cares what it means - it sounds cool. “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

@freshspotlessyouth 2025

Oooh...great atmosphere right out of the gate, and then drums kick some ass. I really like that old rhyme you found. I don't even care what it means, it just sounds cool. I really like this. I like how the drums and vocals provide momentum while the atmospheric sort of drones on