Offering
Each breath is revenge
This is the story of the first song;
The first song of my first album.
(The song was not written first, however).
‘Offering’ first existed as a completely different version. I wrote it back in the summer of 2022. Then, it was temporarily named ‘hey, you’. All that existed was the first verse and the break into the second verse. The old verse (which I no longer have, but will do my best to recall from memory), went something like this:
The city opened up my veins,
[...]
We found each other again
Ran through the leg high grass
And tested our fawn-ish legs
Meters could become miles, again
I still wait for your call
Every now and then…
Yes, it was (sort of) a love song about being reunited with a lost friend, because that was what had happened to me at this time. There was someone who I had loved so deeply, the kind of love where where you stay up late talking about nothing, about everything; planning trips, losing breath laughing over inside jokes, sharing poetry, sharing dreams. They left my life, somewhat suddenly, more so slowly, and after a few years reached out to me, early on in that summer. We spent a day together again, and everything felt so much more hopeful, like it had been a matter of minutes, not years. Every second was spent filling the air with all the words we had to share. But then, with the brevity of their return into my life, they departed, without another word, once again, this time, for good.
Life has a way of souring or changing the meaning of songs or poems that I have written in a very particular context. Sometimes I can still sing them, sometimes I cannot. In this instance, I couldn’t justify all the time I would need to devote to this song, nor could I justify having a song about hopeful reconnection open my album when that very connection was now entirely gone.
So, with a more bitter ink in my pen, I edited the existing words:
The fields opened up my veins,
The sun cleaved into my head
I find myself again
Arose from the pools of blood
And tested my fawn-ish legs
Meters could become miles, again
It was a more personal, more bloody turn, one that I felt captured the initial essence of this album’s folk-core and its musings on new life, on new possibility.
I had, between the two versions, been building this song, which was also part of the reason I couldn’t fully scrap it: I loved what I had created too much to let it go, a little like my friend, who, for another two years, I fought for unremittingly.
In the early stages of the album’s gestation, I knew I wanted a big ‘builder’ for an opener. In my head, I recalled every time (which is around five now) I’ve seen the IDLES live; they start with one element of their opener, the drums or the bass, and gradually, bar by bar, build up into the song, one instrument at a time. So, on ‘Offering’, we start with the background noise: wind, sheep (obviously I’m going to open ‘Lamb’ with a bleat!) and bells. A synth comes in, then sticks, then vocals, then drums. Then,
We build tempo,
We stretch out our legs,
We shake our limbs,
We get the heart pumping,
We raise our hands
For the offering
There are a few hidden gems buried amongst this building sound, I will unveil my favourites, here:
The air and the animals
Murphy’s purr
My friends
The grass drums
All of this is to create a feeling that does justice to the ebb and flow of the album between states of urgency and vulnerability, hence the break-down into the softer, slower clearing in the middle of the song.
You’ve risen from birth,
tested your legs,
run through the leg high grass,
and landed somewhere new:
Each spring is a gift
Each breath is revenge
I never felt one with my youth
Until the water ran dry
There’s a call back to the last words of Cotton Ribs in the second verse:
I fall into love as one falls out of tragedy;
Feet first with an open heart
I always want there to be some through-line through my music (like the trilogy of centre-piece songs in my EPs: i, ii, Please Love Me [iii]). Everything is connected, it all co-exists in these fields, these tapestries of song.
I leave you with a simple chant that stumbles straight into the fury of ‘Brother’:
Leave me here,
Remove all of my fear
A (one man) choir builds
And chaos unfurls.
I fell upon something more introspective,
The realisation of the opportunity for re-birth.
So much of Lamb is life and so much is death in all its iterations
I’m so glad you’re here with me
Let’s run through these fields together
Maybe there’s something
On the other side
Maybe it’s good
Maybe it’s bad
Maybe it’s both
You’ve got to take it to find out
All photographs taken by Joshua Osman