tongues (info)   [lyrics]

capo 3rd chord formations:

There are a few reasons why I had to write this song.  The first was that I wanted to show how irrelevant the meanings of words in songs actually are by replacing them with "nonsense" words.  The second was because the sounds of the words popped into my head when I was messing with the chords and I thought they sounded better than the lyrics I tried to use.

The idea of a nonsense song isn't anything new.  In a Mike Doughty live track called Grey Ghost, he sings the chorus using nonsense words, and there's a Dispatch song, Elias, where a good bit of the verse is in Swahili.  I know Swahili isn't exactly nonsense, but if you don't speak it, it serves the same purpose because it doesn't sound like any other language you commonly hear and could readily identify.

Also, it appears the lead singer of the band Sigur Ros made a whole CD using a language of his own design.  Neat!

The title comes from the Christian concept of 'speaking in tongues,' where one spouts gibberish only understood by demons and Satan.  The original lyrics were going to play on this concept, as is evidenced by the first few lines of the first and second verses:

     "In a grove of sycamore trees,

      in the woods so deep that the moon can't see..."

     "In a star in a circle of ash

      is an unstained girl in a robe and sash..."

I will eventually track the English version, but I don't like it as much, so it's not a project I'm racing to finish.  Like many contemporary albums, I wanted to end this one with a pseudo-serious, half-joking track that'd be three minutes after the last song if there were a way to do it.  But there's not, so consider it a hidden track in plain sight.  The only hidden thing is what the words really mean.