'Yew Trees (The Mixes)' by Giant Glove

Anglo-Japanese sound scientists Giant Glove collaborate with Bred Pudding Collective (BPC) to bring us an EP of remixes of their track "Yew Trees."

"Yew Trees" started out as a symbiotic poem by haiku poet Paul Conneally (a founding member of BPC) written via the process of "link and shift" that comes from renga poetry writing.

Shuntaro and Paul of Giant Glove set the poem to music with a few shifts presenting the two tone, two voice poem in a slightly different form. It appears on Giant Glove’s Giant Glove album of 2018.

They recently passed the master tracks to Bred Pudding Collective and the resulting EP is now on general release. It includes mixes by Rocket To Nowhere, Bred Pudding Collective, and Little Onion.

The song explores a scenario where a young, now separated couple with a child, still meet each other occasionally on a bench under the yew trees in a just-out-of-town shopping centre called "Yew Trees."

It’s a song of love and loss in the modern world of the disassociated urban spectacle of family and soul.

Here’s a link to the original poem and when you listen to the song you will see how Giant Glove have taken the original to new places.

It’s interesting to track the lyrics back to poem to Wordsworth to parchment then on to spoken word and the EP mixes.

The original poem is worth checking too.:

Symbiotic Poetry is a term sometimes used to describe poems that incorporate elements from other writings and writers through a process of "link and shift" to create new works.

"Yew Trees" has its roots in the William Wordsworth poem of the same name. The new poem and then the lyrics include fragments of the original Wordsworth poem which are then used to set up an intertextual discourse between the new poem / lyric and also between William Wordsworth, Conneally, the reader, Giant Glove and anyone listening to the song too. We are at once in the past, the present, and the future.

When you look at Wordsworth’s poem and the lyrics of "Yew Trees" by Giant Glove you begin to see how the two are interlinked.

Here are the first three lines of Wordsworth’s "Yew Trees":

“THERE is a yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,Which to this day stands single, in the midstOf its own darkness, as it stood of yore:”

And now the chorus of Giant Glove’s "Yew Trees":

“A young manStanding in his own shadow”

We see Wordsworth’s yew tree standing in the midst of its own darkness and Giant Glove’s young man standing in his own shadow.

Both Giant Glove’s song and Wordsworth’s poem speak to and of "place". Wordsworth’s yew tree is in Lorton Vale, a real place and Giant Glove’s yew tree is in a park or other public space, not a specific place but a place anyone brought up in a British urban/suburban area might recognise:

“We come her oftensitting under the yew treeson the old park bench”

Giant Glove have said that they have imagined it perhaps as the "green" area of a shopping centre, it too named Yew Trees, but in the end we probably all find our own place, our own yew trees.

Here is a link to William Wordsworth’s Yew Trees poem as presented in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s, ed. Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes. England: Vols. I–IV. 1876–79.

Pop, dance, and rock song lyrics can be and often are quickly dismissed by some as throwaway words with no substance. Sometimes they might be just that and that somehow in itself can be their joy, their attraction but others go deeper whilst still sounding "throwaway", especially their singalong choruses as with Giant Glove’s "Yew Trees." Let’s not forget that Wordsworth himself and his coterie of romantic poets was feted like a modern day pop star and even now his poems, such as "Daffodils," are learnt off by heart and recited by school children across the world. Yes the similarities between pop songsters and romantic poets are there to be seen if we just look and listen.

Yew Trees (The Mixes) is out now and available on all major digital download and streaming platforms with vinyl versions out soon.

Here are links to Spotify and Apple Music.