Chickabee

In the folk tradition there’s a rich seam of death ballads. I’d been listening to a lot of Appalachian music around the time I wrote this. Once I decided to try to write something in a particular style, I had to identify what it is that distinguishes that kind of music. So I had to find a different vocabulary, not just lyrically, but musically too. The other crucial decision I made early on was to make the protagonist of the song a woman.