Annotated Songs: The Crane Wife 1 & 2

The difficult birth of a bird

The Crane Wife 1 & 2¹

1

It was a cold night ²
And the snow lay round
I pulled my coat tight
Against the falling down
And the sun was all
And the sun was all down³

I am a poor man⁴
I haven't wealth nor fame
I have my two hands
And a house to my name
And the winter's so
And the winter's so long

And all the stars were crashing 'round
As I laid eyes on what I'd found

It was a white crane
It was a helpless thing
Upon a red stain
With an arrow its wing
And it called and cried
It called and cried so⁵

And all the stars were crashing 'round
As I laid eyes on what I'd found
My crane wife

And how I helped her
And how I dressed her wounds
And how I held her
Beneath the rising moon
As she stood to fly
As she stood to fly away⁶

And all the stars were crashing 'round
As I laid eyes on what I'd found
My crane wife

2⁷

My crane wife arrived at my door in the moonlight
All star bright and tongue-tied
I took her in
We were married and bells rang sweet for our wedding
And our bedding was ready when we fell in⁸

So sound the keening bell
And see it’s painted red
Soft as fontanelle⁹
The feathers in the thread
When all I ever meant to do was to keep you
My crane wife¹⁰

We were poorly, our fortunes fading hourly
And how she vowed me
She could bring it back
But I was greedy, I was vain and I forced her to weaving
On cold loom, in a closed room, with down wove¹¹

So sound of the keening bell
And see it’s painted red
Soft as fontanelle
The feathers in the thread
And all I ever meant to do was to keep you
My crane wife

There's a bend in the wind and it rakes at my heart
There is blood in the thread and it rakes at my heart
It rakes at my heart¹²

My crane wife

1. I think I started writing this song — just ruminating on the germ of the song, really — in 2003. I didn’t finish it until 2005. These days, it’s not uncommon for me to labor over something for two years, but it felt like a long time back then when I was singularly focused on songwriting and making work for my band. Oh, the flush of one’s late twenties! I got the idea for the song from a children’s book, Sumiko Yagawa’s 1987 retelling of the Japanese folktale. I found it in the kid’s section of Wallace Books, my place of employ back then. Jenny got me the job; she was working there too. I was busily shelving books in the children’s section when I came across it. Don’t know what called out to me, but I sat there on the floor and read it. It was a beautiful, sad, simple story. I figured a song could come out of it. I think I pretty quickly tried making that happen.

(As it happens, the bookshelves of Wallace Books provided the inspiration for more than one Decemberists song — I had this idea to write an ersatz prog-metal songsuite based on the Irish myth The Tain after someone had brought in a used copy of Kinsella’s translation of the epic.)

2. The feel of this song owes a lot to Belle & Sebastian’s “The Boy With the Arab Strap.” Of course, they’re not the first to write a song with that major key swingy 4/4 vamp. We’re all, at the end of the day, just borrowing from each other. A lot of times, leaping off an existing song can be a great angle for the start of your own tune. I like to think that song feels/rhythms/tempos are pretty public domain. They may spring from the same source, but they tend divert and branch pretty quickly. You don’t want to carbon copy the song, you just want to get that feel. I’d always loved the gallopy feel in “Arab Strap” and had been keen to try it in one of my songs for a while. I made an attempt at it with “The Infanta” but that ended up galloping in a very different direction. Crane Wife 1 was more of a direct homage.

3. “Crane Wife 1” was the second of the Crane Wives to arrive. My first attempt was a melody and chord phrasing that became Crane Wife 2. I don’t think I set out to write an multi-song thing initially; I figured I could fit it all in one song. Crane Wife 1 only came about when I had abandoned this first attempt.

4. The story of the Crane Wife goes like this: a poor, lonely peasant is out in the forest one day when he comes across a wounded crane, downed by hunters. He revives the bird, pulling the arrow from her wing, and the bird flies away. Days later, a beautiful woman arrives at his door. They fall in love immediately and are married (as you do). Together, they live an impoverished life. The peasant convinces his new wife to weave cloth that he might sell at the market. She agrees to do this on the condition that the man never watches her as she works at the loom; she must do this in secret. The man agrees and his new wife retreats to a closed room in the back of their cottage. She emerges the following day with a bolt of cloth that is the most perfect and elegant the man has ever seen. The cloth fetches a healthy price at the market and the man demands his new wife produce some more of this heavenly stuff — even though it is clear that the task of making this cloth is exhausting for the woman. This goes on for some time and the couple become wealthy. One night, however, as his wife is laboring away in secret, the man’s patience overcomes him and he opens the door to the weaving room. There is the loom and the cloth, but instead of his wife sitting at the shuttle there is a large white crane. The magic bird has been pulling feathers from her wings to weave into the cloth. This is the secret that makes the cloth so beautiful. The man has broken his promise and thereby broken the spell — the crane takes flight, dashing out the window and into the sky. He never sees the bird — nor his wife — ever again.

5. Even though the story is pretty simple, it’s always a trick to get a story into a song. There’s a delicate balance between clearly telling the story and making it not feel like a rote recitation. A song demands something elusive in the telling. Here I am, trying to create an evocative world in which this simple story can take place.

6. I think I’d already written the first verse of Crane Wife 2 by the time I tried my hand at this one. “My crane wife / arrived at my door in the moonlight” was immoveable, as if set in stone. I also think I’d come to this realization that the meter and tempo of Crane Wife 1, despite my best efforts, would never be able to tell the whole story. Instead, it became the prologue, the setup. I would return to the abandoned Crane Wife 2 to tell the rest of the story.

7. Ugh, this one was tough. I get a little triggered just looking at it. The chord progression owes a lot to Robyn Hitchcock, I think. It’s got some Veins of the Queen DNA in it. I don’t know how many false starts I had with this particular song, but I know it was a lot. I’d get a verse in and abandon it, come back to months later and try a second verse. Still no good; I’d rewrite the first verse, try a different bridge. Eventually I’d given it up for lost. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get it to hang together. It wasn’t until I’d come up with this idea of it being part of a bigger whole that I had some hope for the song.

8. There are some rhymes/slant rhymes that come out fully formed, with very little agonizing, and this one: “bells rang sweet for our wedding / and our bedding / was ready…” was one of those that just tumbled out of the pen. It’s not groundbreaking or anything, but I always was fond of it.

9. Oh look, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists has used a fancy three syllable word in one of his songs, let’s ask him about it in interviews. Fontanelle isn’t that weird, guys. Fontanelle is a word that lots of people know. I probably ended up writing it into this song because A) it fits — the softness of the thread might be like the delicate softness of a child’s skull and B) I had a newborn when I was finishing up this song and when you’re a dad for the first time, you tend to think a lot about fontanelles and worrying about sharp things accidentally going through them. That kind of stuff.

10. This was one of the first harmonies that John Moen really nailed. He was new to the group still; making the Crane Wife LP was his first recording session with us. For whatever reason, I think our voices really link up with this song. Even when we’ve had auxiliary backing singers — as we often do on tour — I’d always insisted that we not delegate this one harmony vocal to someone else. John really does it so well.

11. Yeah, I don’t know about this verse either. I think I’m at peace with it now, but I think it always felt a little unsatisfactory. Looking at it now, I suppose it’s not so bad, but I might’ve had higher expectations for this, the last verse of the song. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though! I recall writing and rewriting these last few lines many, many times before I was just, like, fuck it, it’s good enough. Let’s keep moving. Sometimes you just have to do that. And sometimes the offending verse or line mellows in time and you forget that you ever tussled with it; sometimes it sticks in your craw forever. This is one such line. Alas.

12. I do like this line, though. These last few lines, this bridge-like coda, has always been my favorite part of the song. Both in recording and performance. That word “heart” is at a kind of sweet spot in my register — it’s high but not too high and I can usually really lay into it on stage. I also like how it comes across in the recording, with everyone in the band singing HEART! HEART! HEART! That feels good and right.