Bayside Lament Deconstructed

Ok, Patreon community: here’s the moment you have been waiting for–the release of Windborne’s most-requested song, our “how-to guide” for our arrangements: Bayside Lament Deconstructed.

If you’ve attended a Windborne concert in the past few years, chances are you’ve seen us perform this as an encore. We have resisted posting it publicly online because we still like it being a surprise for new audiences, but we wanted to share it with you here because you helped us reach our first Patreon goal: building a community of 50 patrons!

Keep an eye out for the audio, which we’ll put up in a separate post, but it’s really a multi-media experience so we had to share this patrons-only video first. 🙂

Backstory on this song: Many moons ago, the four of us sang with a group of Village Harmony alums called Renewal, which put together self-directed tours for 6 years in early January. One winter, Renewal was singing Bayside Lament, a traditional-sounding sea ballad starring a gay couple that Lynn and Will had just written. Jeremy was having fun making up a bass part for it with lots of anticipations and rhythmic variations, and as Lynn and Will were chatting with him about his approach to the song, he played them his inspiration: Finest Kind’s John Barleycorn Deconstructed (from their album For Honour & For Gain), where they describe the arrangement of the song as they sing it. Lynn, Will, and Jeremy thought it was hilarious, and ended up learning it to perform for the rest of Renewal, to everyone’s great delight.

The cleverness and wit of the song stuck with us in Windborne over the years, and we kept talking about wanting to have a song like that in our own repertoire. It didn’t feel right to just perform Finest Kind’s piece for several reasons: it’s a trio arrangement, it mentions them each specifically by name, we don’t sing John Barleycorn anyway, and a key tenet of our identity is that we write our own harmonies and arrangements. 

Then, in December 2014, Lauren had a quiet night at home over the holidays and after a few glasses of wine, was hit with inspiration. Soon, she had a full draft of re-written lyrics to Bayside Lament that essentially narrated what was happening in the arrangement and harmonization of each verse. Since Lynn and Will wrote Bayside, it’s one of the few songs in Windborne’s repertoire that is 100% ours in melody and harmonies (the original Bayside Lament is on our album Midwinter Meeting.)

It was an instant hit, and we spent much of our January 2015 rehearsal retreat collapsed on the floor in peals of laughter as we refined the lyrics and started singing the song. It became clear very quickly that we had two main challenges:

1. Could we get through the song without cracking each other up? 

2. Could we perform it for other people, who would be laughing at our jokes, and not totally lose it ourselves?

For a while, the answer to both questions was a hard no, and there were many run-throughs during rehearsal that were derailed by accidental eye contact and contagious giggles. 

We had someone in mind to be our first test audience, a friend who has been a Windborne fan from our first show, and (most importantly) always finds us funny. We knew that if we could sing it in front of her, we could sing it for anyone. It was rough going at first, since she laughs easily and whole-heartedly, but we persevered, and since then Bayside Lament Deconstructed has become one of our signature songs. 

We are excited to share it with you, and hope it brings you as much joy as it has brought us over the years.