Songs of the Stag annotated playlist: track 2

Cànan Nan Gàidheal, Tide Lines

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The first time I heard Cànan Nan Gàidheal, I was mesmerised. I didn’t understand a word of the lyrics, but that didn’t matter. Then beside me, in that cramped festival tent, some guy started heckling the band. ‘Sing something in English!’ he cried. It wasn’t until I got home and looked up a translation of the lyrics that I realised the irony of his words. The song is a lament, a mournful reflection on the way the Gaelic language has suffered, and a testimony to how it prevails. While ‘Prelude’, track 1 in this playlist, looks to the future, Cànan Nan Gàidheal takes a step back. I wanted to capture that same sense of loss in Storran, especially surrounding the languages of ‘Leid’ and ‘Old Storrian’. Gaelic speaker or Scots speaker, we can all relate to being told our culture is not. proper or worth nurturing.

“Cha b’ e ‘n t-uisge ‘s an gaillionn bho ‘n iar,

Ach an galair a bhlean bho ‘n deas

Blàth duilleach is stoc agus freumh

Cànan mo threubh ‘s mo shluaidh.”

Translation from rewild.com:

“It was not the snow and frost from the north,

nor the acute cold withering from the east,

it wasn’t the rain or the storms from the west,

but the sickness from the south

that has faded the bloom, foliage, stock and root

of the language of my race and my people.”