Rust - Song Five

Lyrics:

Maybe it’s the spreading of the rust,

Alas the rivets in my head are bust.

This the fate of the Western-Line.

Even Brunel’s engines wear with time.

 

Is it that my names in their Domesday book?

The cost of every rill and every brook,

While all of fair England’s riches misread.

Were the children of the druids tamed by the pen?

 

“Nay let the fire spread” the oak and the holly said.

“You shan’t make some gallows from us sacred trees.”

 

A soothsayer’s serenade, of black dogs, and worn clichés;

A chorus of voices that judge and don’t help.

I say, “Down with the lot of you”, the Wheel’s turn shall renew, the hawthorn flowers shall bloom again.

And I shall be shot of it, the old sad narrative told to me by the cards I meet.

 

Maybe it’s the spreading of the rust,

All my leaves are tainted by its dust.

In the shadow of hundred-thousand men,

I’m auctioning my heart for a cent.

 

I used to believe some devil had cursed my mind,

With car-trod thoughts and a gypsy pride,

But I scryed the shadows and the world got strange,

This accursed apathy’s not from my veins.

 

“Nay let the fire spread”, the oak and the holly said.

 “You shan’t make some gallows from us sacred trees.”

 

The same old merry dance, an ancient heathen trance,

In awaking I cried for to dream again.

 

For she speaks in a riddled tongue, as soft as a breath is sung,

The lightest kiss may blow her away.

 

While rust may cover me, ivy to smother me,

My ears yet hear her the untold song.

 

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes grow.

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes grow.

 

Hey there funny man, pockets full of money man, going to the Styx to pray?

Hey there preacher man, full of the teachings man, what is it you want to say?

Hey there dolly bird, singing a story heard, not all tunes sound the same.

No not a wise man, nor some nice man, don’t trust a word you say!

 

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes grow.

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes grow.

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes.

Let me go, down where the rushes grow, down where the rushes grow.

  • The Recorded Version

    The “studio” version of the song as recorded by my good self.

    Listen Here

about

It was late April, and the sap was starting to rise. The prelude to May always used to make me think of this land’s pagan roots, some innate part of me recognising the rising year, the turning of the wheel.

My happiest memories are in, and surrounded by nature being a part of it, a creative green surge ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’

I find at the root of many of my frustrations and unhappy thoughts a sterile humanness, a rust. Not a humane feeling, but judgment and inadequacy, failure to fit and conform, the fear of a wanting found by that other person or institution.

None of this is present in nature, no one asks the trees why or how. The sparrows in the field do or die by their own hand and fortunes’. Not fair or entirely free, but solid and ultimately indisputable; nature makes no second guesses. In away this is in contradiction to my thoughts on doubt, yearning the freedom to live in the moment. I still haven’t reconciled these two pillars of my thinking and many of my songs reference both.

The song references everything from Burns to Shakespeare even the Normal Invasion. Singing the 400 or so words in the 4 minutes is quite a struggle, but always an enthusiastic one.