One of my favourite tracks on F.I.R.’s latest album isn’t really a song at all; in fact, I’m not sure how to describe it. It reminds me of a read-a-long story set to some medieval-sounding music, or at least what medieval music sounds like in the movies. A little like the Fable demo that was online before the game came out.
Long ago, there was a bird who sang but just once in her life
From the moment she left the nest
she searched relentlessly for a thorn tree
never resting until she found one
Then she began to sing
more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth
But, carried away in the rapture of the song
she impaled herself on the longest, sharpest thorn
But as she was dying
she rose above her own agony to outsing even the lark and the nightingale
The thorn bird traded her life for that one song and
the whole world was captivated to listen!
And God, in His heaven, smiled upon her
As her very best was brought out only at the cost of great pain
Driven by the thorn, with no thought for her death to comeBut when we push the thorn into our breast
We know …
We understand …
And still … we choose the pain of the thorn …
The title is “The Legend 傳說” and it’s beautiful in a sad way. Right now, I’m just puzzled over its meaning. The last few lines, especially.
Is the song suggesting that great beauty can be born of great pain? Or that it’s stupid to subject ourselves to something like that?
Wasn’t she outsinging “the lark and the nightingale” even before she pierced herself with the thorn? (Unless nightingales and larks aren’t “creatures on the face of the earth”, but that’s even less likely.)
Oh, and isn’t there some reference to larks and nightingales in Romeo and Juliet?