by Thexalon, originally published on his blog “The Joy of Thex“
The late fall season is upon us. The last bit of crops have been brought in, I’ve been busily winterizing my house in preparation for the deep cold of winter, and there is a sense of the world dying as it turns towards darkness. As is typical for modern pagan types, this leads to a focus in this season on our beloved dead and our ancient forbearers. This song started with a moment of insight about how, in the unfortunately many memorials I’ve attended, the living become stories of our friends, and those stories can gain mythic quality the further from directly being there they get. When you get to hero cults that were popular throughout much of the ancient pagan world, there’s a decent chance there was an actual person at the start, and then the fish got bigger in each telling to the point where it was now some giant mythic thing.
This is aiming to be fairly simple musically, with the major key aimed at comforting those who mourn with the future the person has as a story and memory so long as they keep it. The key of Eb was chosen because it fits well in my voice, and also has a nice warm quality in my experience, so guitarists would probably be happier capo’d at 1 fret up. Given the hymn-like quality, I thought about using a pipe organ, but I don’t really have one of those handy, so I made do with my squeezebox. I could imagine this being sung in a group though, rather than a solo endeavor.
All works are copyright by yours truly, but may be distributed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 4.0. That means, in short, you can use them yourself and your grove, and play the song to your heart’s content both in private and in public, but must give credit where credit is due, and if you’re planning on selling something involving this song we need to talk about that first.
