My dear people,
I have a new song out called ‘Proserpina.’ It is the second single from my upcoming album ‘Glorious Light.’
You can stream the song here:
https://ffm.to/proserpina
A little on the song:
I wrote this one a while back, during lockdown I think, it’s all a blur. But I was deep into Roman and Greek mythology and I came across the haunting story of Proserpina (in the Greek Persephone).
The story roughly goes that Proserpina is promised to Pluto, the king of the underworld, against the wishes of her mother. One day in a field, Pluto sweeps in and drags her too the depths and makes her his queen. Proserpina’s mother is furious and makes the earth barren, she wilts the crops and makes the fruit rot on the trees, much to the horror of the humans. Eventually the king of the gods, Jupiter (or Zeus in the Greek) brings her back from Pluto.
However Proserpina ended up eating a few pomegranate seeds, and because she ate the fruit in the underworld she was forced to return for a few months of the year, so every year the world turned bleak again. This was a story used to explain the seasons.
Lyrically I drew heavily from this story, It’s also likely at the time I felt a similar strain in my own relationship at the time. I remember writing the line:
In a thrice ploughed field of thrice sown grain
You pour out the mice and you pour them out again
you’ve tied her to a tree in the ash and the rain
Specifically at the time, my ex and I had mice in the apartment and we struggled to find solutions for it and I remember having fights about it haha. Anyway the reference to the thrice sown field is straight from the Homeric hymn telling the story of Demeter and Persephone aka. Ceres & Proserpina.
Another final tid bit, the last line of the song,
If the moon was made of gold would you burn for it or drag it down to the depths of hell?
was drawn from a line straight out of Dante’s inferno:
For all the gold that is beneath the moon, Or ever has been, of these weary souls Could never make a single one repose.
And he writes this fabulous image of these souls in hell pushing up bags of money up the hill, but never reaching the top. It’s great haha.