About this Song
I've been sitting on How the World Was Born for the last year. I've avoided releasing it because it feels sort of epic— seriously there's choirs and strings and the birth of a child and... some days that all sounds corny and exaggerated and other days I feel it.
How the World Was Born is about when you (yeah, you) were born. I wanted to remember how sacred and mysterious it was when you arrived: a new voice, new memories, new histories, a new fracturing of reality— a new world.
Because no one really knows where you came from. I mean, we know in one sense ("dude, sex") but in another sense it's a cosmic mystery...
And no one really knows how you broke into consciousness. I mean, we know in one sense ("bro, neuroscience") but in another sense isn't it strange and mysterious that you emerged onto this plateau of words and colours and feelings and kindness? And if you think long enough about all of this and if you're not feeling particularly despairing that day, doesn't it make you feel something like gratitude?
Lyrics
They named you Dawn
After the rising of the sun
For the promise each life brings
Standing over you in the nursery they thought
Of how you emerged from a great beyond
Tiny hands separate the light from the dark
Sounds and colours pulled apart in language
A heart bursts open wide with words, expressions of life
And that is how the world was born!
You begin life as a flickering lantern light
Falling asleep in a rotation of arms
Drawn into the world by words and smiles
As you begin to order a murky world
You, a gift from the great spinning centrifuge below
Emerging and awoke on a great wide plain
In time you’ll shoot poems, prayers like flares upwards to heavens gates
Cause that is how world is born!
Like the shatter of glass you first discover pain
How broke things can’t be put together again
But you were born in such a glorious, burning light; or have you forgot?
[Pidgeon English] Oh sumbodee, oh sumboddee, oh sumboddee, up!