Annotated Songs: The Island

Heavy vibes from 2006, unpacked here

Illustration by Robert Anning Bell for The Tempest

The Island
(Come and See / The Landlord’s Daughter / You’ll Not Feel the Drowning)¹

“Come and See”²³
There's an island hidden in the sound
Lapping currents lay your boat to ground
Affix your barb and bayonet
The curlews carve their arabesques
And sorrow fills the silence all around
Come and see⁴

There's a harbor lost within the reeds
A jetty caught in over-hanging trees⁵
Among the bones of cormorants
No bootmark here nor finger prints
The rivers roll down to a soundless sea⁶
Come and see
Come and see

The tides all come and go
Witnessed by no waking eye
The willows mark the wind⁷
And all we know for sure
Amidst this fading light
We'll not go home again
Come and see
Come and see

In the lowlands, nestled in the heath
A briared cradle rocks its babe to sleep⁸
Its contents watched by Sycorax
And Patagon in parallax⁹¹⁰
A foretold rumbling sounds below the deep
Come and see
Come and see

Chorus

“The Landlord’s Daughter”¹¹
As I was a-ramble
Down by the water
I spied in sable
The landlord's daughter

Produced my pistol,
Then my saber
Said, “Make no whistle
Or thou will be murdered!”

She cursed, she shivered
She cried for mercy
“My gold and silver
If thou will release me.”

“I’ll take no gold miss,
I'll take no silver
But I’ll take those sweet lips
And thou will deliver!”¹²

“You’ll Not Feel the Drowning”¹³
I will dress your eyelids
With dimes upon your eyes¹⁴
Lay you close to water
Green your grave will rise

Go to sleep now, little ugly
Go to sleep now, you little fool
Fortywinking in the belfry¹⁵
You'll not feel the drowning
You'll not feel the drowning

Forget you once had sweethearts
They've forgotten you
Think you not on parents
They've forgotten too

Chorus 2x

Hear you now the captain
Heave his sorrowed cry
"The weight upon your eyelids
Is dimes laid on your eyes"¹⁶

1. This trio of songs were written between 2003 and 2005 in various places around Portland, Oregon. They always seems to have belonged together, these songs, as I demoed them as a suite of songs at home before the band laid into them in rehearsal and in the studio. “Come and See” and “The Landlord’s Daughter” were written on a Gibson 12 string guitar, one of the only instruments of mine recovered from the 2005 theft; “You’ll Not Feel the Drowning” was written on a nylon string guitar, my grandfather’s 1930s Goya.

2. “Come and See” is the title of a 1985 Soviet film directed by Elem Klimov. I think I had first seen it a few years prior to writing this song and I had earmarked the title as something to use for a song. I might’ve initially thought about making more overt references to the movie throughout the song, but I was just following the thread of the song as I wrote and it never really took me to the subject of the film. It remains, I guess, as a sly nod to one of the great anti-war films of our time.

3. This song begins with an unofficial 4th part, the instrumental riff that kicks things off. I believe I’d written it after the other parts were written; I felt like it needed some kind of heavy opener before it dropped down into that more-reserved single guitar line at the beginning of the first verse. As you can hear from the demo, it started out in as much more Sabbath-y than it became. I think we determined, in the studio, that just going all fuzz box on the riff was perhaps too on-the-nose, so we jammed on it for a while using different instruments to see if we could get somewhere more interesting. What we arrived at is what you hear in the final recording. The particular arrangement of that opening instrumental bit has never quite settled for me — the decisions about how long each part should go, how long the entire section should last, these were all decided fairly arbitrarily. Why does it repeat the central phrase 4x then 2x, then back to 4 and finishes with 2? Whose idea was that? And why? I’d make it shorter if I could do it again.

4. An island hidden in a sound, that’s the jumping-off point. Don’t know how I arrived there. To my best remembering, the song started with that Em picking pattern; it sounded mysterious, gloomy. The words that formed from the void were a hidden island. I kid you not: I often envision Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Island when I sing this song — I wonder if I was influenced by that. That book was an early favorite of Hank’s, and I’ve read it more times than I care to count. Hank wasn’t born, though, when I’d finished this song… so it couldn’t be that.

5. Chris Funk sang this as “A Jenny Conlee over-hanging trees” one time in rehearsal and I cannot unhear it.

6. A little copped Coleridge here, from “Kubla Kahn:” “…Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” I think my island owes a lot to the stately pleasure-dome and all its surrounding gardens and caves of ice. It’s a sublime and romantic place, and one that is full of terrible, powerful things.

7. I’m not sure I wholly intended this — I can’t really remember why certain decisions were made during the writing of this song — but I do think this is a reference to Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Willows,” which is a story that really affected me as a kid. I read it aloud on a camping trip with some friends in middle school and it scared the shit out of us. That island on the Danube, where the canoers camp, is an antecedent of my island, with its looming, frightful willows.

8. More babies abandoned in wicker cradles (in this case, a “briared” one). Without a doubt, this particular baby was birthed underwater in a river to two drowned parents, discovered and placed in this makeshift cradle, only to be discovered again by a group of people looking for their next child monarch and paraded in a palanquin.

9. A fucking English major wrote this sung, huh.

10. I’m not going to unpack this too much, it’s mostly just three words that sound good together. A Patagon is a kind-of cryptid believed to have lived in Patagonia, in southern Argentina. I’d just finished reading Bruce Chatwin’s great “In Patagonia” when I wrote this and Patagons were on the brain. Sycorax is Caliban’s mom from The Tempest; parallax is what happens when two viewers see something from two different positions and it skews perception, like what a speedometer needle looks like to the driver vs. the passenger, but in this case the speedometer needle is an abandoned baby in a cradle and the driver is Sycorax and the passenger is a Patagon. Makes perfect sense.

11. I was in a heavy 60s-70s folk mode when I wrote these songs. While the recording of Picaresque was informed by repeated listens of Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief, I’d gone deeper into the rabbit hole as I wrote songs for what would be The Crane Wife: Anne Briggs, Nic Jones, Pentangle, Shirley Collins, June Tabor, The Watersons, and Dick Gaughan were all jangling around in my ears like so many beans in a Full English Breakfast. Before, I’d only dabbled in writing folk songs that sounded like they might’ve sprung from a different era; “The Landlord’s Daughter” was my first successful landing of one, I think. The general vibe owes a clear debt to American folk-rock as well, with a quick triplet 12 string picking I might’ve cadged from CSNY’s “Deja Vu.”

12. Pretty standard folk song elements here: a rake-figure exacts some kind of revenge against someone from the privileged class. Another read, and one I’m inclined to make, is that it is more in line with the “vagabond-makes-good” theme from folk song. There’s no saying that the narrator and the landlord’s daughter don’t make off on horseback to a better life, away from an isolated life of wealth — a la Janet and Willie’s escape at the end of “Willie O’Winsbury.”

13. As mentioned above, I’d been reading Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” during the writing of these songs. There’s a great section in that book where Chatwin recounts the nineteenth century sea voyage of a Charly Milward (I think this is correct; I’m doing this from memory — I seem to have misplaced my copy!). The ship hits rough seas; afraid for his life, Charly is huddled in his hammock below decks. A fellow shiphand calls him “little ugly” and advises he should just go to sleep; thereby he “won’t feel the drowning.” I nabbed it and put the whole imagined exchange into a song.

14. To be used as payment when you’re ferried to the underworld, natch. From the Charon’s Obol myth.

15. A sneaky bit of Dylan Thomas tucked in here, from Under Milk Wood. “It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah.”

16. This song was recorded at Kung Fu Bakery, in Portland, Oregon, in Spring of 2006. Chris Walla and Tucker Martine co-produced it with the band. I had initially envisioned “The Island” being the song that kicked off the record, being one of two three-song suites that would bookend the record, the other being The Crane Wife 1, 2, and 3. In the sequencing, however, I was convinced by Chris Walla, the co-producer, to lop Crane Wife 3 and put it at the top of the sequence. He wanted to avoid having these two lumbering song-suites weighing down the record. I think he was right. “The Island” remains one of my favorite songs to play live — we’ve given it breaks here and there, but it has been a mainstay of sets since we recorded it.