Occasionally a song will end up on not one but two soundtracks. It’s rare, but it does happen; rarer still is the piece with lyrics that does so. Most tend to be instrumental-only, for obvious reasons.
Fleet Foxes’s Your Protector ended up on the Romances of Arquitaine soundtrack partly because of the change between soft, plaintive courtly love and driving danger. It’s very much a song Tristan d’Arcenne might abstractly hum while setting up some bit of intrigue, his mind mostly on how the situation will play out and that corner of him thinking upon Vianne, as it always does. The Queen’s Guard might sing it during their famous ride from Arcenne to keep their spirits up, and while Vianne might know it, it’s probably not one of her favorites.
She’s much fonder of Jesse Cook.
I haven’t put the Romances soundtrack up yet because some of the tracks have been lost while shifting from one music platform to another. I have them written down, of course, but it’s slow work resurrecting when I’ve so much else to do.
The other soundtrack Your Protector appears on is the Gallow & Ragged one, which is up and public. I didn’t even realize that particular track was on both until I was writing Roadside Magic, which has a fair bit of both Robin and Jeremy “running from the devil”, so to speak. It is very much the sort of music the Good Folk love, as is a lot of Fleet Floxes (and Linda Ronstadt, strangely enough). Mostly it’s Jeremy Gallow trying to come to terms with the fact that he loved in Daisy merely the dead-leaf echo of Robin Ragged–as Nabokov would put it, a dead russet echo in a ravine.
Robin is too preoccupied with survival and mistrust to really do more than simply take notice of a line or two, and think for a longing moment how it might be to sing without destroying everything in her voice’s path. So often, an abused child is told they are at once helpless–because the big people keep hurting them without consequence–and inordinately, maliciously powerful, because if they dared to openly tell what they’re suffering the abuser’s entire house of cards will come tumbling down. The mixed messages can really fuck a kid up, and when a talent such as the Ragged’s voice gets added to the mix…well.
I may have wrought better than I knew in that series, but what else can one do when writing of the Folk?
Tristan and Vianne had a somewhat-happy ending; the Ragged and the Gallow not so much, though Crenn would beg to differ on that last account. (Only if his pride would let him, of course.) On the other hand, I know what happens to the Hedgewitch Queen and her Left Hand years afterward, and I know whether or not the Ragged ever goes back to Summer…
…but that’s another story, or two.