Song Deconstructed: Spell Songs’ ‘Bells Fall Still’ by Karine Polwart

Karine Polwart: “The structure of the words came first, then the melody, then the harmony around it.” Photo: Gaëlle Beri

How a simple melody and the imagery of birds shaped one of the most important songs on ‘In Thin Air’

Karine Polwart has built a reputation as one of Scotland’s most compelling singer-songwriters, unafraid to tackle difficult subjects through her music. Since 2018, alongside Julie Fowlis, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter and Jim Molyneux, she has been part of Spell Songs, the seven-piece collective bringing together some of the finest voices in folk and world music.

Initially formed to respond to The Lost Words, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s celebration of the natural world, the group has since grown into a creative force in its own right. Their third album, In Thin Air, takes inspiration from Macfarlane and Morris’s The Book Of Birds, exploring the wonder of birdlife alongside the alarming decline of bird populations.

Here, Karine reflects on how a couplet from the book provided the starting point for Bells Fall Still, and how she and Kris Drever shaped it into a stark, understated ballad about the birds of Gaza, the devastation of their habitats, and the human cost of oppression…

Read about more songs being deconstructed

Inspiration

Bells fall silent without their ringers
It’s not enough to love the song
if you forget the singers

I have Scots ballads on my tongue, the near mythic, narrative songs of Scottish cultural tradition which document internecine rivalry, cruelty, and bedevilment. Many are built around quatrains with second and fourth-line rhyming refrains. So, when I read Robert Macfarlane’s couplet in the lush compendium The Book Of Birds, which he co-created with Jackie Morris, I understood the architecture of a song to follow.

I’m one of seven songwriters and musicians in Spell Songs, which also includes Orkney’s Kris Drever, Senegalese kora maestro Seckou Keita, Gaelic singer Julie Fowlis, cellist Beth Porter, harper Rachel Newton and multi-instrumentalist Jim Molyneux. Our albums respond to the environmental themes of Rob and Jackie’s books, including our new album In Thin Air, which speaks to avian biodiversity loss and the cultural symbolism of birds.

Lyrics

I changed one word of Rob’s, swapping out “still” for “silent”. It sings more softly. This forms the scaffolding for a song called Bells Fall Still. When you’re dealing as a writer with issues of nesting and fledging, fragility and flight, song and migration, it’s a short step to consider humans alongside birds. The ecological degradation of our mudflats and moors, seas and skies, accompanies a terrifying acceleration of political oppression. Extraction and dominion characterise both.

Birds are often symbols of freedom and transformation that flit in and out of myths and folklore, story and song. Many of the birds mentioned in Bells Fall Still are familiar in the UK. All of them live in Gaza.

I imagined a turtle dove in an olive tree, a nightingale on a minaret. When Kris brought a potent line about the nightingale losing her song among the rubble, I knew this image was our final verse destination, and that we just had to figure out how to get there. For me, this kind of raw, searching storytelling needs intimacy. So, me and Kris found quiet space together over a few days with his guitar.

In recent years, we’ve both been moved by the work of Gaza Birds Singing, a musical project of dogged, creative resistance led by Palestinian musician, Ahmed Abu Amsha, former coordinator of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza City. Ahmed brings music to Gazan displacement camps and sometimes leads his students in quiet defiant humming along with omnipresent weaponised drones. Such brave and beautiful work. It enrages and disgusts me to learn that one of those drones is the Heron TP, which falls right into our world of birds.

Karine Polwart: “The imagery of Bells Fall Still is so stark and dark that we were keen not to over-complicate our arrangement.” Photo: Gaëlle Beri

Music

The song is musically simple and repetitive, as traditional Scots ballads are. There are no choruses, only refrains. I brought an unaccompanied melody to the writing room as soon as I had a verse of lyrics to play with, and the tune barely changed at all as our writing progressed. The fourth-line melody alters across the song, with two clusters of three verses each, the first two in each cluster ending on a short fourth line that sings, “It’s not enough to love the song” and the third in each section ramping up intensity by extending over the longer lyrical and musical phrase, “It’s not enough to love the song if you forget the singers, no, it’s not enough”. The structure of the words came first, then the melody, then the harmony around it.

In The Studio

We recorded at Castlesound Studio in East Lothian, not far from Edinburgh, close to where I live. The imagery of Bells Fall Still is so stark and dark that we were keen not to over-complicate our arrangement. We maintain a sense of directness and dignity on a sparse recording underpinned by Kris’ guitar accompaniment. Other than a sprinkling of piano in the instrumental bridge, the only production build is the layering of additional vocals. We’ve performed the song live since and expanded the arrangement a little to include cello, viola, whistle, and kora. But it’s still extremely raw and understated, as it should be.

Final Thoughts

The horror of Gaza is immense. What can any song say? The motif of birds gave me and Kris license to create something that speaks with both anger and sorrow. A lyrical aviary of birds appeared once the song’s purpose was clear: the Palestinian national symbol of the sunbird at its outset, the sparrowhawk an obvious cypher for persecution, and the nest-stealing, egg-clearing horrors of the cuckoo, another metaphorical gift.

It feels vital to speak of unspeakable things, in hopes that the state-sponsored devastation of Gaza, and the genocide of Palestinians will end. Let’s neither forget nor forsake the singers. Peace on them all.

The album In Thin Air is out now, and you can find out more about all the Spell Songs albums via thelostwords.org/spell-songs-albums and for music, tour dates and more, visit karinepolwart.com

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