New Song: "Sierra"!

With early demos for paid subs

It’s HERE! (apologies if Spotify takes a little longer)

I struggle mightily with lyrics, and this is what makes folk songwriting so hard for me. Over the years I’ve become fairly OK at bashing out some new-ish folk melody that sounds fairly traditional, and this is something I’m happy with. But lyrics that sound traditional, poetic and powerful are extremely difficult.

This is partly why 75% of the material in the folk/celt-punk genre is “arrrgh let’s get drunk”. With all due respect to that excellent song, which we ourselves have written 12 or 13 times, it’s an easy way to avoid the hard work of actual, well, poetry. The listener’s brain goes: “Oh neat, this is just about drinking, it doesn’t have to be meaningful! I like this low-effort slop! I think I’ll make a Spotify playlist with all 1,289 versions of it!”

So of all the songs on the new album, I am most happy with the lyrics in Sierra:

But the song actually has a complex history.

First, it is unofficially dedicated to a little girl I met while I was out with my son on the playgrounds of The Bronx. She’s probably about 10 now, and she was the sweetest, most energetic and wonderful kid you could ever meet. And while I can’t get into the details, she was also clearly a kid who was going to face a lot of uphill battles and barriers to happiness. When writing the album, I would think about her sometimes, and about how she was going to have to develop enormous resilience and independence if that brilliant energy wasn’t going to be extinguished by a cruel and unjust world.

So I took that hoped-for resilience and independence and poured it into the fictional character of Sierra, the antagonist in a good old fashioned murder ballad. Influences here are the traditional murder ballad The Outlandish Knight and Nick Cave’s dark, magical The Curse of Millhaven.

Sierra is a fisherwoman and native of Martinique, an island that’s featured in at least one other song of ours. And she is romantically pursued by the unnamed captain of a docked ship, who is driven mad when she keeps her distance (i.e. she is not as automatically compliant as the ‘girls of Old Maui’). He catches up with her, and:

I took her hand roughly with an evil design
Come away now, Sierra, you’re finally mine

This “with an evil design” is the poetry stuff I’m talking about. That phrase’s usage peaked in 1814, according to Ngrams. But the two lines clearly communicate that violence is on the table and that the dynamic has taken a dark turn.

I knew of course that she’ d have to stab him to death. Nothing else would make sense. The standard approach would be to write some hackneyed verse about her plunging the knife deep into me breast, ya harrr, I’m done fer, me hearties, let the blood stain the ground ‘pon which I pour me last regrets, ya harrrr.

But good poetry doesn’t say what happens, it lets the reader infer what happens by hints and vague descriptions. So the actual last verse catches up with our narrator a few months later:

So now I am lying at rest
Her knife gatherin’ rust in the depths of my chest
As the fishies pick my bones away
At the bottom of Fort o’ France Bay
And the red moon arises right up to the sky
And a lonesome Jacana sings a final goodbye

Of course, the Observant Bird is a classic theme in European folktales. I used it heavily in the criminally underrated Poor Michael. And the description “lonesome” is derived from Hank Williams’ famous “lonesome whippporwhill”.

So all in all, these are good lyrics. And the band loved to do the shouty bits.

The song has one more influence, a song written by my own father. 20 years ago he played me this amazing folk/murder balled he’d written called “Macon Jones”. I don’t think it ever saw the light of day, which is sad, because my Dad writes brilliant stuff and I always idolized him growing up. No chance I’d be playing music at all if it wasn’t for him. So way back in 2005, literally a month before starting the Dreadnoughts, I put together a badly-sung and horribly-recorded version of the song.

Wanna hear it? Become a paid subscriber, eh! Below this paywall, not only do paid subs get to hear the original demo of Sierra I made before the band got their filthy mitts on it, paid subs also get to hear that dusty old recording of “Macon Jones”, complete with broken old banjos, out of tune guitars and a singer who hadn’t learned to sing yet and who was trying not to wake his roommate. Worth $5/mo, no? Well, maybe.