(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
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).