1) Prologue

Dogtertjie, het jy verdwaal?
So lanklaas tuis, weg van liefde bekend
Meisiekind, kruip tog nou nader
Hier's 'n gehympie wat ek jou vertel

Little girl, are you lost?
So far from home and all love that you know
Lift your head, dry your eyes

Gee my jou hand
Laat my jou by die paatjie af lei


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Literal Translation:

Little girl, did you get lost?
Such a long time since you've bene home, away from familiar love
Girl-child, just crawl closer, now
Here's a secret I'll tell you

Little girl, are you lost?
So far from home and all love that you know
Lift your head, dry your eyes

Give me your hand
Let me lead you down the path

__________________________________________________


At the very beginning of the story, the little girl, age 5, is found by an old man - a complete stranger to her - in the heart of a forest. She's crying, sitting in the middle of the little dirt road; it's the same road she lives on, but further down, where she can no longer see the little house she lives in. The man approaches her and stands next to her for a moment, waiting for her to look up at him. When she does, he picks up the child and begins to sing her this lullaby, comforting her, though she continues to cry. At last the tears stop and he puts her down, taking her little hand in his as together they walk down the dirt road back towards her home.

2) Catharsis

She is such a wreck
Grins framed upon the walls are not her face anymore
Child's become a mess
Twelve months or seven years, there's no difference

The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside

Recollections of
Dreams dreamt within these walls
They won't stop screaming
They pierce right through her hands, infect her arms, crumble her spine
Sprawled across her floor, she stares right past him

The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside
Her vision's bloodred glare
Crime scenes and wild hair
Punctured fingers trace lines down her cheeks
Their shrieks are laughter now

Warm, safe, laid in her crib,
She rolls, as with a smile
Devils grip their blades
She's in danger, too; with a knock on the door
Mother starts to sing

"Wake up dear, stir now please
Wipe the sweat from your brow
Your dreams are so dark,
I must not let you know
This violent world or its cruel, deadly kiss"

The demons in her eyes
Each night is her demise
She's struggled for so long, and can't escape
The walls all make her stay
Closed doors keep hurt away
With arms open, steady grasp,
The stranger's hand reached in to set her free

__________________________________________________

She is such a wreck
Grins framed upon the walls are not her face anymore
Child's become a mess
Twelve months or seven years, there's no difference

It is seven years later and the little girl has grown up. The twelve-year-old version of the same child is substantially changed. In fact, she has changed to such an extent that the pictures of the child in frames on their walls are no longer an accurate representation of her. In the past year, she has disintegrated into a psychological mess, and the time that has passed since has felt to her as though it were an eternity; as long, at least, as the seven years since she got lost in the forest. This establishes an important connection between her getting lost in the woods and an event in which she lost herself a year ago.


The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside

The girl is plagued by visions of "demons" that she simply cannot rid herself of - or, perhaps, they simply can't get out. They have been with her for "so long" - the eternity that has been the past year, or, indeed, the past seven years.


Recollections of
Dreams dreamt within these walls
They won't stop screaming
They pierce right through her hands, infect her arms, crumble her spine
Sprawled across her floor, she stares right past him

Here it is revealed that the images she's been seeing have been in dreams, and that there have been many. The pronoun "they" is left undefined to stand for either the demons in her dreams (subject in the chorus, and which are already known to have been laughing) or the dreams as a whole. Regardless, the fiasco has been violently destroying her from the inside out, wiping her out on her bedroom floor. There is clearly another figure present, but she does not notice him; she cannot, in the state she is in.


The demons in her eyes
Their laughs are no surprise
She's known them for so long
They're trapped inside
Her vision's bloodred glare
Crime scenes and wild hair
Punctured fingers trace lines down her cheeks
Their shrieks are laughter now

The content of the girl's haunting dreams is introduced as it is explained how these images of "crime scenes and wild hair" have destroyed her. Her vision has turned red, meaning that she sees this chaos everywhere and in everything; but more literally, it creates the association between the color red and her eyes themselves - her eyes are bloodshot as a reflection of her despair. Solidifying this image, the image of the demons' "punctured fingers" - bloody fingers, then - have traced lines (like tears) down her cheeks. She's not crying of her own free will, she is having this torture forced upon her by the demons, the dreams, the visions she is plagued with. The last line confirms the terror of her situation: she is utterly at their mercy, as these howling demons laugh at her sadistically.


Warm, safe, laid in her crib,
She rolls, as with a smile
Devils grip their blades
She's in danger, too; with a knock on the door
Mother starts to sing

The music has changed moods at this point to softly rolling chords. Narration has escaped the girl's mind and now stands outside of her horrifying dreams in her bedroom, watching her as she sleeps. Despite the internal turmoil, she seems to be in deep sleep. The sleep renders her comatose, helpless, lost, in terrible danger at the hands of a host of demons - but one would never have suspected such danger in a child's sweet slumber. Clearly the danger is internal, but the thought is introduced that perhaps it is external as well (as the phrase "she's in danger too" may apply to either the internal or external descriptions in the stanza). Her mother knocks on the door of her 'peacefully' sleeping daughter, coming in to wake her up at the start of a new day.


"Wake up dear, stir now please
Wipe the sweat from your brow
Your dreams are so dark,
I must not let you know
This violent world or its cruel, deadly kiss"

The mother tries to wake her child as she notices with a twinge of protective worry that the girl has probably been having bad dreams again. She is aware, to an extent, that her daughter has been troubled by nightmares over the past year, though she knows nothing of the contents of those dreams since the girl is unable to speak of them. It is also evident that she knows why her daughter must be having these dreams, but she is afraid that if she shares anything, that it will aggravate the state of her daughter's damaged mind, just as the knowledge has already damaged her own. Just like her daughter is hidden away within the confines of her skull, her mother hides the truth about "this violent world and it's cruel, deadly kiss" from her daughter - the "cruel, deadly kiss" signifies that the "violent world" her mother refuses to let her daughter know has caused a death. The details of this death are the mother's secret and the source of both the mother and daughter's pain, although it is to be noted with disgusted irony that the mechanism of the girl's mother's protection - the attempt to prevent her from knowing "violence" and "cruelty" and "death" - is the act of allowing the girl to stay in the bloody, inescapable hell-hole that is her nightmares.


The demons in her eyes
Each night is her demise
She's struggled for so long, and can't escape
The walls all make her stay
Closed doors keep hurt away
With arms open, steady grasp,
The stranger's hand reached in to set her free

Every night, every night, she is subjected to this torture; every night, she is subjected to this bloody struggle. Every night, she struggles to get out, but she is confined by the boundaries within her own head and she can't get out. More than that, she's also cooped up by her mother, driven into isolation: once again, the irony of this reality is brought out with the note that the "closed doors" - her mother's unwillingness to let her daughter into the world - has supposedly "kept hurt away," where it has really only succeeded in driving the poor girl insane. In a startling contrast to the rest of the song, the last line provides a strange release: although literally, the mother has become a stranger to the daughter because of the distance between them (the daughter's inability to communicate because of her nightly trauma, the mother's unwillingness to give her daughter the full story about the death that has occurred), and has just woken her up and "set her free" from her dreams, there is a meta-narrative taking place. That the old man is a "stranger" is the only further description he's given in Prologue; this scene acts as a flashback to Prologue when he took her hand and lead her away from her fear and into security, but it also foreshadows the resolution of her pain.

3) Practice Time

Instrumental

4) Shoes

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Sixteen inches from the flames
From their blades
Quenched by salty sea

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Sixteen inches from the flames
From their blades
Quenched by salty sea

The sea
How he longs to smell the sea
Living sea
With a moment's rest, all the rest rise up higher

And his mind just rolls right under their footsteps crashing over
Echoing through in a dance
Tale old as time
Older by chance even than wine
Licked up like sugar spilled on the streets

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Stunned by beams of peasant lightning
Idol lighting
Don't you trust them!

Come close your eyes with dough and collodion
Or maybe sew them up, so you can see
Barely inches from the flames
From their blades
Quenched by salty sea

The sea
How she longs to smell the sea
Living sea
With a moment's rest, all the rest rise up higher

And her mind just rolls right under their footsteps crashing over
Echoing through in a dance
Tale old as time
Older by chance even than wine
Licked up like sugar spilled on the streets

He made shoes
Don't make those shoes!

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Less than inches from the flames
Don't you blame
Those quenched by the sea.

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This song is the story of the little girl's father and the way that he died. Although he is the fourth and last character to be introduced, the symbolism in his death serves as a parallel not only to his daughter's struggle, but more broadly to the human struggle.

Just about all of the symbols I used for this song come from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, but also from Roald Dahl's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which I read as a child and which made quite the impact on me. If you have not yet read A Tale of Two Cities or can't remember its contents, this is the text that inspired all of this...

I read TOTC for a literature class in tenth grade. The description of the people in the street, of the wine, of the incredible poverty, the hunger, is the most wonderful depiction of human depravity. Truly, we are all like the French peasants from Chapter 5 of that novel - all groveling around in the "rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them." Each one of us is parched, starving, for lack of sustenance, desperately clawing away at dirt under our feet in search of nutrition. And what is it we're all looking for in the muddy cracks in the street? Wine, red wine, a substance of an addictive nature: blood. Our depravity pushes us to look for wine, and the wine, in turn, simply pushes us to look for more. This wine so rarely seems to be drunk to health and holiness around a table in communion; instead, we drink in the shit-laden street, our noses buried in the dehumanizing wastes of our polluted lives. "Cattle," says Jacque. Instead of accepting the cup that purifies, we choose to wallow in our own filth like animals.

And so the people's depravity keeps building and building, slowly pushing them towards the unthinkable. In Handheld, just as in TOTC, there had come a time "when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there"; in Handheld, too, there was a time when a townspeople swelled up like the sea does in the wake of a "tempest." In both towns, the depravity of man loses its patience and turns to murder. This spilled blood under the townspeople's feet is the blood of the little girl's father.

A different father soon becomes subject to observation in TOTC. Just as a new scene is set - seemingly in contrast - a more human figure of depravity is introduced: Monsieur Manette. Although he certainly shares non of their background he has been the victim of injustice just as the people in the streets have been. He is reduced to acts of desperation, of addiction, just as they are. Shriveled with twenty years of undeserved punishment, Manette has had the life and soul drained out of him, leaving a mere shell of a person: the maker of shoes. "With his back towards the door, and his face towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes."

He made shoes.

Like Manette, the little girl's father seemed different from the world in which he worked. He was, by profession, a shoemaker, and regularly worked on his trade at home, living with his family in his cottage in the wood. But despite the meagerness of his trade, he lead a contented, civilized life there in the forest, surrounded by his young wife and little daughter, reading, playing his beloved piano, steadily hammering away at the shoes he was soon due to sell. Every couple weeks, he would kiss his family goodbye and pack his work into a cart. Mounting his horse, he'd pull it all away to the town nearby, returning a few days later with wages and a small load of groceries.

He was a very responsible man, an educated man, adored by his daughter and loved dearly by his wife. But he also worked very hard to provide for them, and often made his clients promises he couldn't keep. Steadily, he earned himself a terrible reputation, the ramifications of which he began trying to circumvent by cheating and lying and stealing. In his haste, he had scratched the side of a pair John's shoes that he'd been repairing; he couldn't quite finish fitting the buckles onto the straps of Mary Jane's. All too often, an extra piece of leather or an extra reel of canvass would disappear off the racks, or the milk would vanish from their porches in the morning. Though the townspeople had no way of convicting him with certainty, a spirit of resentment towards him mounted into a more odious hatred with each visiting weekend.

It had actually started in celebration. It was the night before Billy's wedding, and the men were having a few beers in the bar down the street. But the night drew on and with every hour, they got tipsier and tipsier, until the celebration had birthed a drunken fistfight in the street. As the party broke up, on a slightly less lighthearted note than it had begun, a particularly rowdy group noticed a light burning down the street: the lone shoemaker, working hard at his trade by candlelight. And so it came that the spark of resentment lit a fire: just a few minutes later, the men entered the room and approached him where he sat, bent over a cup of well-deserved tea, after several grueling hours' uninterrupted work. They began roughing him up, pushing him around and insulting him. Retaliation lead to retaliation, and soon, the poor shoemaker was tied to his chair, screaming in pain, with several stab wounds to show for it. In the excitement and commotion, the candle was knocked onto a small stack of papers; the flame took and spread onto the desk, onto the floor, up the walls. By the time all the drunken hooligans had stumbled their way through the door, the wooden shack was crumbling to pieces behind them.

Come morning, all that was left of the man and his shoes and the house and its contents was a heap of cinders and ash. A telegram arrived at the stone cottage tucked gently into the forest just a couple hours later; by the time her daughter awoke, the heartbroken widow had burned the telegram in commemoration.

____________________________________________________

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood

Here an irony is pointed out - shoes are made for the purpose of walking, and yet the maker of shoes keeps the vibrant, bright little bundle of life - his daughter - inside, to keep her from walking away again. (Light as a symbol for life is quite important in this song; I draw on it for both positive and negative effect.) Indeed, his own life is trapped in the woods - the life he has in town is a shriveled, depraved life in comparison. The image of light trapped in the woods is one I return to on several occasions: the streetlamp the girl ends up worshiping as her savior is hidden away in the woods just as she is. Her father is similar to her in many, many ways, the least of which being that he has also made a light his idol - she is his purpose, his joy, his meaning in life. She is the reason he is driven to do what he does in town; providing for her as best as he can gives him the necessary excuse to cheat and steal the way he does. Similarly, the streetlamp is what later causes his little girl to forsake her mother's love, and his own, though he's been dead for a year. And thus, the shoemaker's sin has turned on him: despite his good intentions (caring for his daughter), the same sin applied in his daughter's life (running after the streetlamp) negates his efforts, since she must forsake his love in (unknowingly) following his example.


Sixteen inches from the flames
From their blades

At first, it seems as though the shoemaker is able to keep a healthy distance from the townspeople's wrath.


Quenched by salty sea

The shoemaker's light - life - is quenched - he's killed - by the sea - the townspeople.


The sea
How he longs to smell the sea
Living sea
With a moment's rest, all the rest rise up higher

And still he taunts the sea, tests it, as though he'd like to know if he can get away with it just one more time. And he does so to fulfill a longing - it's all in the attempt satisfy the people, so that he can fulfill what he's made his primary duty, that he prods at the sea's patience the way he does. The storm was bound to come: just as the poor man begins to relax, the fruit of his labor rises over him, giving him a truly eternal rest.


And his mind just rolls right under their footsteps crashing over

His mind was sold to the masses. All his security had been hinged on their patience, and when they finally acted their revenge upon him, he was destroyed mercilessly. "The living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city ... The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes, voices of vengeance" (Book II, Chapter 21).


Echoing through in a dance
Tale old as time
Older by chance even than wine
Licked up like sugar spilled on the streets

This dance is another motif from TOTC: it is the Carmagnole, the mob-dance of death, horror, and violence, sung by the blood-drunk masses in celebration of their victory. "No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport - a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry - a healthy pastime changed into a means of angering the blood, bewildering the sense, and steeling the heart" (Book III, Chapter 5). As I read those words, an image of the epitome of all "innocent" dances came to my mind. The association was too wonderful keep itself out of the lyrics when I went to write the song. Both tales as old as time... Murder is one of the first sins recorded in the Bible, and from an evolutionary standpoint, millions of creatures were killed before humanity ever existed. And still today, the dance continues - a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry. A dance of death and horror and violence, danced in the defiant, blood-drunk ruins of human depravity.


He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Stunned by beams of peasant lightning
Idol lighting
Don't you trust them!

Walking, walking on those dirty stones, their cracks filled in with grime and the blood of the masses. The father doesn't want his daughter walking there. He doesn't want her to be left so vulnerable.

Just as many drops of water together make a swelling sea, many sparks together make a roaring fire; this heat concentrated into a murderous beam is lightning. He's constantly trying to please the people: they become idols just like everything else we try to please. The mob is an idol, the daughter's an idol, the streetlamp is an idol - light, light, light is an idol. Worship of the created in place of creator. In its most basic essence, that is what the entirety of this story is about. Don't you trust them!


Come close your eyes with dough and collodion
Or maybe sew them up, so you can see

This is the bit from Henry Sugar. In that book, Henry is learning from a guru how to see through plaster as though you were using your eyes. He explains to him that the best way is to get someone else to try to make you as blind as possible - first, sealing your eyelids shut with collodion (which Merriam-Webster says is " a viscous solution of pyroxylin used especially as a coating for wounds or for photographic films") and then making dough molds for your eye sockets, around which you're supposed to wrap tons of bandaging and then the plaster. Basically, you're completely blind. That's the point of the process. In the song, the speakers of these words are the mob, the idols: they're beckoning for the shoemaker, or even to all the rest of us, to blind ourselves, as they promise us sight. In a bit of an ironic, sadistic aside, I added an extra phrase hearkening back to another TOTC motif, that of burial (for under all that plaster, you've given yourself QUITE the burial). I had just finished a brief period of obsessive research about the history of cadaver preparation when I was writing the song, and apparently, there was a time when people tried to sew cadavers' eyes shut so they didn't pop back open again. (Don't ask me why they didn't use glue.) Regardless of whether or not people did that very much or for very long (it seemed like there was quite the controversy surrounding the topic), you've got to be either pretty dead or in a pretty wretched hell if you're having your eyes sewn up. Once you've bought in to the idols'/mob's offer to you, you're dead. Hate to break it to you, but you ain't gonna be seein' much after your eyes have been sewn shut for you. This should be obvious to us, but all too often, we seem to buy into the ridiculous excuses our vices present to us, simply because we need an excuse to give in to those temptations. We look for excuses to sell ourselves to the Devil. We are all the actors in selling ourselves to the Devil. Every one of us is at fault; we have all fallen; we have all actively given ourselves over to death. That blood is on our hands.

Zooming back out again to look at the lyric as it applies to the girl and her mother, her mother tries to blind her daughter to the reality of her father's death, protecting her even more than she and her husband did before he died. Despite her best intentions, she is killing her daughter, because she has become the creature telling her daughter to sew her eyes shut.


Barely inches from the flames
From their blades
Quenched by salty sea

With every moment, the impending doom creeps nearer...


The sea
How she longs to smell the sea
Living sea
With a moment's rest, all the rest rise up higher

And her mind just rolls right under their footsteps crashing over
Echoing through in a dance
Tale old as time
Older by chance even than wine
Licked up like sugar spilled on the streets

Daughter follows in Daddy's footsteps. The changed pronoun acts in foreshadowing her imitation of his tragedy. From here on it is clear that she will have a parallel story.


He made shoes
Don't make those shoes!

He made shoes
Made for walking
Made while trapping light down in the wood
Less than inches from the flames
Don't you blame
Those quenched by the sea.

Which of you hasn't been quenched by the sea? Go ahead, throw the first stone. No one? Oh, okay, then. See, every single one of us has the blood of an innocent on our hands. Every one of us has sold ourselves into death. Every one of us drinks the wine of death instead of taking the blood of the covenant that has been offered to us, freely: there is no one, no one, clean enough to judge the wretched creatures with their noses in the mud. Not a single one of us burns brightly enough to blame those quenched by the sea.
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Demo Track:

5) These Three Loves

Before today began
I thought about if
I'm in your thoughts like you are in mine
When I was watching
That star, as I still am,
I thought, Only it can save me

Stuck between these three loves of mine
The past and the present and future
And what will define my life
When I wake up

Before the morning rose
I dreamed about if
I'm in your thoughts, or if you are mine
These scars that I'm gaining sink deep into my mind
But I know my light will save me

Stuck between these three loves of mine
The past and the present and future
And what will define my life
Once you come wake me up

6) Useless

Loneliness, a friend
Illusions of love
And so the darkness is held
Held and cherished so dearly
Dust turned to man
Dust held in hand
I understand what I've made won't want me

Yet you're the reason I do
You're the reason I don't
The whole reason I work
The whole reason I want
You are all why I feel
You are why I conceal
Whatever's most shameful
It ain't lovely or good
No obsession I should
Aim to cling to or hope in
But when I close my eyes, all my hopes are comprised of is you, you!
Useless

Stones made eyes
Branches come to life
A body sacrificed
For insanity to thrive
With your gaze, I rise
With your word, I fly
With your wish, I die, though you will never be

But you're the reason I do
You're the reason I don't
The whole reason I work
The whole reason I want
You are all why I feel
You are why I conceal
Whatever's most shameful
It ain't lovely or good
No obsession I should
Aim to cling to or hope in
But when I close my eyes, all my hopes are comprised of is you, you!
Useless

You're the reason
You're the reason
You're the reason
You're the reason without reason

Yet you're the reason I do
You're the reason I don't
The whole reason I work
The whole reason I want
You are all why I feel
You are why I conceal
Whatever's most shameful
This ain't lovely or good
It's obsession I should
Aim to flee from, be free from
Still, when I close my eyes, all my hopes are comprised of is you, you!
Useless

Aurum

Dogtertjie, jy het verdwaal
Jy sal sterf in die donker, my kind
Meisiekind
Was jy ooit al nader?
Jou afgod kom moor jou
en val.... almal val.

Ons val
Laat ons reis
Laat ons steig
Kom red ons
Soos ons val
Almal, reis!
Almal, steig!
Kom en raak hom

Hou nou net op!
Vat my hand
Jy is verdwaal, my kind
Kom gryp nou my hand

Kindertjies,
ken jy my liefde?
Julle's nooit ver van my nie, jul' weet
Alle dogters en seuns bring ek nader
Moenie huil of skree nie
Ek het jou hand