"Dark is the Raven's Wing" single NOW AVAILABLE for download on Bandcamp
The song "Dark is the Raven's Wing" is the title track from Kim Erickson's incredibly masterful 2015 album, The Raven's Wing (which you must absolutely add to your collection immediately, here: https://www.kimerickson.ca/)
With the string arrangements by the remarkably versatile Joseph Phillips (from whom I did borrow a few notes for my cover arrangement), the whole album is just a stunning triumph of poetry, lyricism, and warmly genuine musicality. Erickson's performance has a sort of intentional melancholy; a practiced whimsy, like a Merchant-Ivory production of an Edith Piaf fever dream. It has deep, deep joy that is wrapped in a shawl of nostalgia hinting at sorrow; a hiraeth; a Welsh term for that longing we have to return to an ancient home from the distant past that perhaps never even existed in reality.
This is the evocation I get from “Dark is the Raven’s Wing.” This song, more than any other in recent memory, has absolutely clutched at my hiraeth and captivated my imagination.
This is the lyric text poem:
Dark is the raven’s wing, my love is darker still.
Beneath my feet, under the ground, it travels as it will,
By roots and stems and skeletons of winter coming on,
My love is like the raven’s wing, yet its light is blinding strong.
Enter my doorway and linger here awhile,
The shoes are worn, the path is old, it runs ‘cross many a mile,
Along the autumn garden, remembering summer’s bloom,
Ah, dark is the raven’s wing, and lovely is your smile…
But have you turned and caught your breath
As the sun lights up the day,
The ancient grasses brought to life
As the breezes pass their way,
And have you heard their rustling tale,
Did they whisper in your ear?
There is more that I would tell you of the formless words they say:
Sore was her heart that day, and brightly lit with pain.
Her footsteps took the pathway, a clarity to gain,
A rawness in her spirit, and a fullness in her soul
Through flesh and bone and artery some wildness she did claim,
And she cried,
“Where were you when the fruit trees did not burgeon in the field?
Where were you when the harvest shrivelled on the vine?
Where were you when the firmness of your hand in mine did yield?
Where were you when they took from me what rightfully was mine?
Oh, where were you?
Where were you?
Where were you?”
Lie in my arms now and feel the changing tide.
My gaze is to the hilltop, it’s there my heart would ride,
A distance past the autumn garden harvesting its tears,
And the light strikes the raven’s wing, my love flies by its side.
Oh the light strikes the raven’s wing, my love flies by its side.
(“Dark is the Raven’s Wing” by Kim Erickson. Copyright 2015, Northern Singer Music. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the author.)
The author explains that in writing this, she was thinking of her mother’s grandmother, who emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the early 1900s, young, alone, and pregnant. The raven draws from Indigenous lore as the shapeshifter and Creator, bringing light at the end of the narrator’s troubled time.
To me, when I hear it sung in her particular voice, I’m envisioning the narrator alone in a homestead; perhaps something on a Scottish moor, or pulled from the locations you’d see in Vikings or The Last Kingdom; gazing out over the now-barren rolling hills in autumn from the edge of a withered garden. Nearly bereft of hope, she waits patiently for her partner, possibly called off to war never to return.
It’s a beautiful epistle to the fall; to November, which the Finns call “Death Month”; as a time of transition to the sleeping of the earth. The imagery is, to me, Nordic and cold. All these ancient places and icy winds, but the faintest shimmer of hope on the hilltop.
To reflect this, in my way, I’ve always had in mind to perform this as an instrumental metal track, but with a bit of symphonic depth. I’ve drawn from my Scandinavian again, playing the entire first verse on the kantele. I’ve also included as part of the ambient tracks two lines inspired by Tolkien, at the beginning, and after the interlude. In the song they’re actually in an invented Elven dialect, but only because it’s hard to settle on whether this place is in Scandinavia, Scotland, or somewhere in Canada. The lines, in English, are:
"My love for you is as strong as the wind that carries us."
"In the valley where we first met, I will wait for you."
My sincere hope is, of course, that everyone enjoys my rendition, but more so that everyone takes the time to enjoy Kim’s original masterpiece, with its lush textures, rich arrangement, and evocative, timeless storytelling.
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