Likho's Lullabye

Баю-баюшки-баю
Не ложися на краю
Придёт серенький волчок
Он ухватит за бочок
И утащит во лесок
Под ракитовый кусток

Sleep, my girl, and dream of home
Of lamps alight and hearth aflame
A china cup, a silver comb
An old grey wolf for you to tame
A rider come who knows your name

Баюшки-баю, Машенка
За тебя приду, Машенка
Don't you know the story that the babushki all spin?
You'll walk the groove into the world, you'll end where you begin
Only let the story in

Sleep, my girl, and dream of death
Of silver shadows sweet and cool
Of summer's fire and winter's breath
Between the devil and the fool
The only choice is who shall rule

Баюшки-баю, Машенка
За тебя приду, Машенка
There is always a Yelena, there is always an Ivan
Share your heart with gods and devils, share your secrets with a swan
Ах! The world you know is gone

Sleep, my girl, and dream of life
Of pretty maids and handsome birds
Of what it means to be a wife
Of battles hinged upon a word
Now hush, it's just the wind you heard

About the Song

Vixy:
This song was inspired by the novel Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente, a retelling of Russian fairy tales in the context of the Russian Revolution. As a child, our heroine Marya Morevna meets old Widow Likho, and is unaware at first that her new neighbor is actually the magical personification of bad luck. Everything Likho says is cryptic and weird, and for some reason I began to imagine what a lullabye would sound like from the creepiest babysitter ever.

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I took two years of Russian during my undergrad, and we learned some Russian songs and lullabyes. I googled to supplement my knowledge there, and found a suitably creepy and cryptic lullabye to use as a starting point— the opening of the song, in Russian, is that lullabye. (Not that Russian has the market cornered on this; really look at the words to "Rockabye Baby" sometime.)

The translation of the beginning of "Likho's Lullabye" is:

Hush, hushabye, hush,
Don't lie too close to the edge,
Or the little grey wolf will come,
And seize you by the flank,
And drag you off into the wood,
Underneath the willow root.

I based the rhythm and melody of my lullabye on a version of this one, and then decided to just sing the entire thing as an introduction.

The other bits of Russian in the song are:

Hushabye, little Marya,
I'm coming for you, little Marya.

Special thanks to Cat Valente for saving me from an embarrassing weirdness before this got as far as recording. Russian has tons of diminutives for proper names, as a way to show affection, and Marya/Maria probably has the most of them. Many use similar endings, so I used "Mashinka" as a diminutive for Marya— except it turns out that already means "machine". Oops! So I changed it to "Mashyenka" and avoided making the Widow even weirder than she already was.

About the Recording

Vixy:
Recording this song was unexpectedly distracting. I wanted it to be just my voice a capella, because it's a lullabye. What I didn't anticipate: boy howdy do I sound like my mom!

Tony:
As I mentioned in the notes for I Hope You Don't Mind, I think that the sequencing of the album worked well, to have this a capella song follow the long fade-out. On the other hand, the next track, Eight-Legged Blues, is a total stylistic change. Since there wasn't going to be any other place on the album where a quiet lullabye would fit, we decided that pairing it up with the spider song was going to be our best bet. It's our "and now for something completely different" moment on the album.

Being an a capella song, this one was a lot less work for me than the rest. It's plenty of hard work for Vixy, who had to sing it perfectly because her voice is all by itself, exposed without any instruments around it. She of course delivered a flawless performance which sounds appropriately spooky and beautiful at the same time.

For my part, I merely needed to get the EQ and the reverb just right. One issue that I had to deal with is that our house has an everpresent low frequency hum, and I've never been able to isolate where it comes from. It's certainly not any of our appliances, I've checked that. One of my suspicions is that it's noise from a nearby highway causing the house to vibrate at its natural resonant frequency. Anyway, on most recordings you can't hear the hum, but on a solo a capella song like this one, I had to notch it out with multiple parametric EQs.

After the album went to press, we noticed that the word "Lullabye" was spelled two different ways on the album cover. Once to refer to the song title (Lullabye with the e), and once to refer to the traditional piece on which it's based (lullaby ending in y). We decided that's OK because both spellings are legal, and also we can spell a song title any way we like.