Thousands Are Sailing

[IrishRover]

A song takes a moment (anything from a second to an hour or more) to conceive and weeks, months, maybe years to write. It's like a sculpture - you begin with a slab of, say, granite, and in your mind's eye, before you start chiselling, you have an idea of the finished result. However, a few mis-hits of the chisel later, a few unforced errors that lead you somewhere else, you may end up with a different, but no less interesting, structure than the one you thought you were making.

Very noicely spoken!

[IrishRover]

One thingy oi could ask (for that song and in general)...when ya write a song,do ya think about and write the music at the same toime or ya just write the lyrics? oim personally interested in that,cause oim not musician(in terms that oi don't play instruments,oim the singer in the band and lyrics writer for the toime beein'),but oi very often when oi wroite sth have an idea how the music should be for those lyrics although oi can't write the music itself...is it a great disadvantage of moine-not knowing to play instruments and write music for the lyrics oi wroite?

[philipchevron]

One thingy oi could ask (for that song and in general)...when ya write a song,do ya think about and write the music at the same toime or ya just write the lyrics? oim personally interested in that,cause oim not musician(in terms that oi don't play instruments,oim the singer in the band and lyrics writer for the toime beein'),but oi very often when oi wroite sth have an idea how the music should be for those lyrics although oi can't write the music itself...is it a great disadvantage of moine-not knowing to play instruments and write music for the lyrics oi wroite?

Many lyricists who have little or no musical training write to "dummy" tunes, usually existing songs. Before he was a film director, myself and Jim Sheridan wrote a stage musical The Ha'penny Place which was produced in Dublin in 1979. Jim wrote the script and song lyrics, I wrote the music. Unusually for me (I like to have the music first if possible) we began with Jim's lyrics, which he had written to "dummy" music. I never did ask him what the dummy tunes were and he never told me, but he did say that the music I wrote was not what he had expected to hear.

I think it was Sammy Cahn who, when asked about his regular collaborations with Jimmy Van Heusen "Which comes first, the words or the music?" answered "The cheque".

[IrishRover]

very interesting and inspiring,thanks for the answer!

[Eric V]

The song has an emotional charge that hits reall hard. Particularly if you are American. And I don't mean that in a way that says America is "the best" .... but I mean that for some people, coming here was/is the answer to a dream. My Slovak and other Eastern European family members know. In fact, my Grandfather who still sheds a tear while playing "Peg O' My Heart" on the accordion, and still speaks Slovak.

[CraigBatty]

It's surely a fantastic song - a resoundlingly successful marriage of melody, rhythym and poetry (or should be poguetry?). It strikes many's the chord with the transported, the emigrated and the dispossessed here in the 'merry' old land of Oz too. I can hardly begin to imagine the despair felt by the Irish sent to Australia against their will; when they knew full well the disparity between the primitive hell they were being dumped in (a penal colony of the oppressor ruled by bunyip aristocrat psychopaths), and the 'land of opportunity' where so many of their fellow countrymen and women were being sent. Anyway... nice insights yet again, Philip, thanks very much indeed.

[rain dog]

amen to this... i'm an australian of yugoslav extraction, and i know my mother in particular can identify with this song... she's told me a couple of times of her lonely times in high school as a FOB (fresh of the boat) who could barely speak english. but that just detracts from the fact that, even though i am a second-generation immigrant who has never been back to the 'motherland', this song still gets to me... even without that personal experience, i can still feel the mix of heartache, yearning and excitement that this captures like almost no other song i know of on the subject.

i have to admit, back years ago when i first got 'IISFFGWG' i wasn't quite as dilligent in my study of liner notes (these days every word in the packaging is read before i hear anything on any new record) and i unfairly attributed these lyrics to mr. macgowan (my lyrical hero still) and i have to admit i thought he had outdone himself! they are breath-taking...

in particular:
"Across the Western Ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
Now we dance to the music
And we dance"

thank you mr. chevron!

[philipchevron]

amen to this... i'm an australian of yugoslav extraction, and i know my mother in particular can identify with this song... she's told me a couple of times of her lonely times in high school as a FOB (fresh of the boat) who could barely speak english. but that just detracts from the fact that, even though i am a second-generation immigrant who has never been back to the 'motherland', this song still gets to me... even without that personal experience, i can still feel the mix of heartache, yearning and excitement that this captures like almost no other song i know of on the subject.

i have to admit, back years ago when i first got 'IISFFGWG' i wasn't quite as dilligent in my study of liner notes (these days every word in the packaging is read before i hear anything on any new record) and i unfairly attributed these lyrics to mr. macgowan (my lyrical hero still) and i have to admit i thought he had outdone himself! they are breath-taking...

in particular:
"Across the Western Ocean
Where the hand of opportunity
Draws tickets in a lottery
Where e'er we go, we celebrate
The land that makes us refugees
From fear of Priests with empty plates
From guilt and weeping effigies
Now we dance to the music
And we dance"

thank you mr. chevron!

Actually, that's the verse Shane hated. It's back in the song now, after many years.

[brumsongs]

I always wondered why the last verse was dropped, it's stunning. What was the objection to it?

[philipchevron]

I always wondered why the last verse was dropped, it's stunning. What was the objection to it?

I think, essentially, Shane felt "Why bring The Priests into it? And so late in the song too?" It took me a few years to understand that this is one of the main differences between the grievances of the Irish mainlanders and the Diaspora Irish. The Church was, more often than not, a positive social force in the lives of the Emigrants, which could certainly not be said of the Catholic Church's position in the Devocracy of Ireland itself, where Church and State conspired to control the individual much as Sharia Law seeks to now for Muslims (or Christian Evangelicals currently aspire to "guide" the moral, social and political realities of 21st Century America North). I wanted to point out somewhere in the song that exile from Ireland came in a variety of forms, not all of them caused by the Famine or Oliver Cromwell or Queens Bess and Victoria.

I took the view that if Shane couldn't, or wouldn't, automatically see that, there was no point in pressing the issue, so I suggested he drop the final chorus in live performance, it being too late at that point to change the recording. I know Shane too well - if I had picked up the gauntlet of his argument, we would be discussing it still, much as the "Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?" discussion still gets aired from time to time in the Pogues, 25 years later. Besides, we already were engaged in the lifelong debate about what Brendan Behan was or was not capable of doing "up and down the street". And at least, unlike Christy Moore in "Faithful Departed", he did not insist on singing my typos on the grounds that he "preferred" them.

My view of songs is that they are not necessarily obliged to take a point of view - they can be more interesting if they illuminate opposing or contradictory aspects of their subject without settling on a position. In most cases, 32 bars is an awful short time in which to arrive at a conclusion.

[Eckhard]

I never heard the song without that verse.

[brumsongs]

Thanks for the reply, Philip, I'd wondered about that for years. Can't help thinking you should have told him to like it or lump it , though. The verse captures the duality of the emigre experience beautifully, I love it.

[GuinnessDrinker]

much as the "Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?" discussion

This goes back to the diference between knowledge and wisdom :

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad

[CraigBatty]

...much as the "Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?" discussion

This goes back to the diference between knowledge and wisdom :

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad

VERY nice. What a great start to me morning. I shall use that one today at some point.

[IrishRover]

Philip, one interesting question oid loike to ask... when ya finished wroiting of Thousands are sailing, did ya know at once that its gonna be a hit, one of those thats best of yar loife's work.. or ya realized it later, when it reached audience, after good number of gigs?