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Lovers Parting, Dawn

by Jen Lush

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KymMaree
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Mark Seddon
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about

This is a song based on a poem by Australian poet Kevin Brophy, the track merges the human experiences of love, loss and longing with a dynamic soundscape that takes the words from whisper into roar. This is the first single from my new album 'Hum Of The Mettle' due out in August 2023. Kevin wrote this about the poem..

"I began writing this poem in Paris in 2019. The UNESCO City of Literature, Heidelberg, invited six Australian poets to respond to the traditional German form of the Tagelied or 'Dawn Song', a three-part poem relating the plight of lovers having to part at dawn under an onlooker's eye. This beautiful music made by Jen Lush and her musicians takes up the lament of lovers parting. Its tone and feeling arose from my own distance from home; from my talks with asylum seekers and homeless people on the streets of Paris; and from my then still recent task of having to compose the words to be inscribed on my parents' gravestone. They died within months of each other in 2017."

lyrics

Lovers Parting, Dawn

(Kevin Brophy)


If this rising light is needed
before we can begin to speak of love

if you’ve asked that at your grave
seeds for birds be left there daily

and if our hearts always stutter
something far beyond our words

we begin this day in song
to the absence of our song

just as tombstones keep
a hooded silence

despite their chiselled messages of love
lifting smoky filaments of hope into morning fogs

And if in the coming death of day
small birds sing with hearts dark and red

and dangerous as any universe of woe
where each dawn unloves what night has loved

do not say that love does this or life
for the seeds bringing songbirds to your bed

will always break the earth in spring
and seal within what winter takes into itself

where we know the grave is long and long and long
and our frail hearts alive in love are never more than song

credits

released May 5, 2023
Words - Kevin Brophy
Music - Jen Lush

Band
Jen Lush - vocals
Sam Cagney - acoustic guitar
Paul Angas - drums / keys
Mark Seddon - Bass
James Brown - electric guitar

Produced, recorded and mixed by James Brown at Wizard Tone Studios
Mastered by Michael Lynch at Shoehorse Sound
Video by Tobin Lush

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Jen Lush Adelaide, Australia

Jen Lush is known for her spacious and emotive, starkly modern folk songs wrapped around expansive storytelling. From her 2017 album of poem-songs ‘The Night’s Insomnia,’ to her 2021 album ‘Let Loose the Beating Birds’ Jen and her stellar band have appeared at festivals and venues throughout South Australia, Victoria, NSW, WA and Tasmania. New album 'Hum of the mettle' is out now. ... more

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