That told Curnen everything she needed to know, so that within a bar or two, she felt entirely confident to lift her head and sing. "For to see mad Tom of Bedlam, ten thousand miles I've traveled..."
Compared to humans, she was a damn good guitar player. Among her own kind, she was perfectly acceptable, but nothing special yet (she was still learning how to use all of her fingers to their best effect). Her real talent and treasure was her voice, high and pure.
The ambiguity of the song was helped a great deal by having far more possible verses than any one person could sing, and the picking and choosing of them could change the entire meaning. The first two verses were standard, set by years of tradition. The rest was a playground, and Curnen went to work in it. She cut out the verse about fairies that musicians seemed to like these days--it was stupid--but she brought in a lot of the stranger, sadder elements that tended to be left behind for more fun or weird elements. She sang about spirits white as lightning and murdering the man in the moon. She sang of cages and the wars of stars. She sang about a host of furious fancies and the knight of ghosts and shadows.
She made it a song about love fighting and losing to death, filtered through the rambling of a madwoman.
And whether she meant to or not, she poured herself into it, the hollowness and the horror of fading away to nothing, the increasingly desperate scramble to fight and live that remained even when all higher cognition had gone, and the heartbreak she still felt when she thought of her husband.
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zvi
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Date: 2016-08-26 04:41 pm (UTC)Compared to humans, she was a damn good guitar player. Among her own kind, she was perfectly acceptable, but nothing special yet (she was still learning how to use all of her fingers to their best effect). Her real talent and treasure was her voice, high and pure.
The ambiguity of the song was helped a great deal by having far more possible verses than any one person could sing, and the picking and choosing of them could change the entire meaning. The first two verses were standard, set by years of tradition. The rest was a playground, and Curnen went to work in it. She cut out the verse about fairies that musicians seemed to like these days--it was stupid--but she brought in a lot of the stranger, sadder elements that tended to be left behind for more fun or weird elements. She sang about spirits white as lightning and murdering the man in the moon. She sang of cages and the wars of stars. She sang about a host of furious fancies and the knight of ghosts and shadows.
She made it a song about love fighting and losing to death, filtered through the rambling of a madwoman.
And whether she meant to or not, she poured herself into it, the hollowness and the horror of fading away to nothing, the increasingly desperate scramble to fight and live that remained even when all higher cognition had gone, and the heartbreak she still felt when she thought of her husband.