The Reverent Marigold


Songs For the Song God

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Lily Brown

(Drone underneath of any major chord)
C
I saw Lily Brown
Lose her hand in the oil refinery
Oh so clear like autumn dewdrops
G                C
Scattered on the air

I saw Lily Brown
When the chain snapped quick as lightning
As she fell quick as anything
Onto the grating there

I saw Lily Brown
Gasp her last inside my ar-hrems
She was warm and then was cold
The grease slick in her hair

Who knew Lily Brown?
She was lonesome just like everyone
And her eyes shone gold at midnight
In the sodium glare

I knew Lily Brown
She was kind when I was lowly
Took my shift from 4 to Noontime
And she combed my hair

Who was Lily Brown?
Before she was one more body
A crisp malfunction, soon replaced
And soon repaired?

I bore Lily Brown
After she was cold and rigid
And the earth was soft and yielding
In the summer air

I loved Lily Brown
Who lost her life to the oil refinery
She was clear like autumn dewdrops
Scattered in the air

Song Notes

A song in the (somewhat) style of an Irish Sean-Nos song, or at least what we imagined it to be when we wrote it! Also inspired by Lankum's "What Will We Do", this is an exploration of what you can do with just one chord and a dream. The sodium glare mentioned in the song is a reference to sodium-vapor lamps, which are the orange lights you might have seen as a kid before all the LEDs came in. If there is one thing we are a grumpy old lady about it is the replacement of the mellow and beautiful sodium-vapor light (which, we are sure, people complained about being less beautiful than gas lamps) by the harsh glare of LEDs, polluting the night and not even giving the shadows themselves the courtesy of privacy.

But, in any case this song should be sung with as much grief as you can muster, pooling the anger of your mind against the needless violence of industry. How do we remember those who died, unknown and unimportant? What does it mean for your body to become a malfunctioning part, to be cast aside like a broken valve? Beauty is everywhere, but so too is death. Anyways the percussion in this song was done with an old film camera with no film in it just being cycled through it's shooting function to give that mechanical feeling, and the "arhrems" line is from our friend Margot who we lived with when we wrote this song (she wrote it into a song of hers).

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