Follow Me Down
What do people think it's about?
"It's a pagan summoning ritual. It's exactly what it's supposed to be. You only said so in the middle of the song." -- Kate.
"It's a happy little song about taking a girl, making her queen, and then shoving her in a wicker basket before you set it on fire to make sure the harvest is good." -- Chris.
"'Follow me down' could be 'follow me to a bed', but I'm getting more a 'we're fucked so let's at least go into this mess together'." -- Ace.
When presented with this question, what does Seanan say it's about?
"If you're the Queen of the Summer, try to fall in love with someone who isn't the King of the Winter. The same advice goes the other way. It's just not a good idea to fall for someone who can't exist with you for half the year.
"On the plus side, when you actually exist together, the sex is practically guaranteed to be awesome."
What is it actually about?
'Follow Me Down' is about the inevitable marriage of the seasons, and how damn cruel it is to the people who embody them -- summer and winter can be in love forever, and probably will be, but the times when they can be together will always be brief, and inevitably bitter, because no matter what they do or try, they'll have to leave each other all over again. Summer comes quickly. The spring never tarries. At the end of the autumn, he buries her under the roses, and waits for her to come back to him.
This song is about meeting, and parting, and knowing that everything is a wheel. Wait long enough, and the good things will come back to the front.
Genesis of the song:
Sadly, this one doesn't really have a story behind it, beyond 'Seanan was very stressed out about her Toastmistress gig at OVFF, and when Seanan gets stressed, she takes a lot of walks, which inevitably leads to singing, which just as inevitably leads to musical composition, because some things are predictable'. Because that's the way things go.
Musically, I'd been wanting to write a traditional-type walking song for a while -- something that had a nice, rolling beat with no major peaks or valleys, something I could sing on an infinite loop if I wanted to, while, yes, walking. So I'd been noodling with those tempos for a while, and they were all pretty firmly wedged in my head. I had about a dozen false starts before I finally hit on the looping refrain of 'Come to me softly oh come to me sweetly / Oh come to me now as the year turns around. / I.ll give in to you as I once did, completely, / If you.ll follow me, follow me, follow me down, / Come and follow me, follow me down.' Since this, by itself, was something I could sing for about half an hour before I got bored, I decided to chase it.
The first verse came together in about ten minutes flat, probably because the looping qualities of the song hadn't reared their ugly heads yet, making it substantially simpler than what was going to come next. The rhyme scheme was nice and easy, even, running ABABB, with a single circling line. I attacked the second verse with a hammer...
...and discovered that the third B element from the prior verse wanted to join the party, giving me a second verse rhyme scheme of CDCDDB. Oy. I could see where this was going to be an issue.
Oddly, despite my concern over the rhyme scheme, the shortness of the song and solid thematic thrust of the subject matter meant that the second pair of verses was almost as easy to tackle as the first pair (and I remain quite proud of the cornfields/wound's healed rhyme construction, for all that it's a cheater rhyme).
Some songs never want to end. This one just wanted to loop and vary the chorus before I was allowed to exit. Y'know what? At that point, I'll cope. Song done. Ding!
Story of the Song.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Harry March, and he loved a woman
named Melanie Vandermoore. Luckily for both of them, she loved him as
much as he loved her, and under any sort of normal conditions, they
probably would have lived happily ever after. Unfortunately for both of
them, theirs weren't normal circumstances, and their relationship quickly
turned into a cycle of finding each other, losing each other, and oh,
yeah, occasionally winding up dead. It was very complicated.
Eventually, Mel and Harry's original story came to a conclusion, and the pair, lacking anything better to do with their time and energy, moved into the Babylon Wood, which was fascinating for me, since there are very few 'people' in the Wood -- it's mostly animals, some of which can take on human forms. (Although you could argue that Harry and Mel, when in the wood, represent seasons, and thus aren't people at all. But that starts splitting philosophical hairs.)
Melanie, in her dual role as May Queen and Snow White/Persephone figure, tends to die at the end of the autumn, and spends the winter sleeping under the snow, only to wake again in the spring. At which point she promptly tracks Harry, as Winter King, down to tell him that she's back, and that she's sorry. Unless she's pissy about something from the previous autumn, in which case she tracks him down to thump on him.
'Follow Me Down' is a song for the beginning of the spring, when Melanie is newly awakened and looking for her husband, because the cycle needs to turn again. Winter needs to give way to summer, and this is the kindest of the ways in which it can happen.
Arranging the Song.
Because this was a walking song, it very clearly needed that instrument most vital to the Irish walking song: a bodhran. Being an occasionally clever blonde, I asked Kristoph to track down Deirdre McCarthy, aka, 'the best bodhran player I know', and we were able to get her to agree to record a drum track for her. Hers was, in fact, one of our first studio dates, and was absolutely amazing, as I listened to her put a spine behind the words.
Since the song still sounded somewhat unfinished, we considered various string-based options, and finally settled on the octave mandolin, a fabulous instrument not represented anywhere else on the album (and which Kristoph had only just obtained). The mandolin line builds into the drumming, which gives us a much more solid sound than I would have expected from just two instruments. Joy. Sheer joy.
Trivia About the Song.
Despite being the first song on the album, 'Follow Me Down' almost didn't make it. It was cut from the track list for reasons of time, and only added back after 'Continental Divide' had to be cut at the last minute.
Factual Bits and Bobs.
Written on: September 7th, 2005.
Structure: Chorus/Verse/Verse/Chorus/Verse/Verse/Chorus/Chorus.
Arrangement: Lead vocal, bodhran, octave mandolin.
Tempo: High.
Length: 3:11.