No Hurry
by Michelle Dockrey

The horses' hooves on pavement make a lonely echoing sound
I look down between the wheels and watch the slowly passing ground
While the swaying of the wagon makes me drowsy in the heat
I count the faded yellow lines that pass beneath my feet

No hurry, no hurry now
Watch the sky for a moment or two
No hurry, no hurry now
You take your time when it's all you can do
No hurry, no hurry now
From town to town, what's another lost day?
No hurry, no hurry now
Wherever it is, it's far and away

We crest the hill and see the crumbling towers by the shore
Pass the signpost for a bridge that isn't standing anymore
My grandma saw this city grand and busy as a girl
Now the rovers see just a market town, and the homebound, their whole world

No hurry, no hurry now
Watch the sky for a moment or two
No hurry, no hurry now
You take your time when it's all you can do
No hurry, no hurry now
From town to town, what's another lost day?
No hurry, no hurry now
Wherever it is, it's far and away

We pitch camp by the roadside and the children play and run
Gather wildflowers and blackberries and watch the setting sun
Though our labor is of burden beasts, our freedom is of men
For it doesn't matter where we go, and it doesn't matter when

No hurry, no hurry now
Watch the sky for a moment or two
No hurry, no hurry now
You take your time when it's all you can do
No hurry, no hurry now
From town to town, what's another lost day?
No hurry, no hurry now
Wherever it is, it's far and away

Papa says it's best this way, and it's all the life I've known
Still I wonder what it's like to call the Raven's speed your own
To hear the voice of a distant friend or see a distant face
But you can't pick roadside blackberries if you move at such a pace

No hurry, no hurry now
Watch the sky for a moment or two
No hurry, no hurry now
You take your time when it's all you can do
No hurry, no hurry now
From town to town, what's another lost day?
No hurry, no hurry now
Wherever it is, it's far and away

About the Song

Vixy:
A happy little post-apocalyptic sing-along song!

(No, really.)

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
Like a lot of my early songs, this came about because of my husband Fishy (aka Matthew, formerly of Escape Key). He was talking to me about what I now know is a pretty a common idea... a picture of the world after some apocalyptic event-- slate-wiper virus, world war, etc.-- something where the more advanced techology is all gone (electricity, cars, the internet) but the infrastructure is all still around.

It clicked with me one day when I was stuck in parking-lot traffic on northbound I-5, heading into Seattle. Just as you crest the hill near the West Seattle bridge exit, where you can just see the city... did you know there were blackberry bushes growing there? I'd had NO IDEA there were blackberry bushes growing there! Sure, they grow all over the northwest, but I'd always zoomed by and never paid attention to what was around me.

That's when this song really started to formulate; how much we never notice until we slow down. I thought about how, in that post-apocalyptic world, many people would never travel or communicate with people far away; all they'd see all their life is the home they'd made in the remains of the crumbling cities. Those who did travel-- because in any human civilization there will always be traders and explorers-- wouldn't be able to go zooming from place to place. Their life would necessarily be spent paying attention to their surroundings.

Long time filker Karen Rall once remarked to me at a con that "No Hurry" made a great sing-along song. I'd simply never thought of it that way before, because-- hey, post-apocalyptic! But people do seem to enjoy singing it. So there it is-- a post-apocalyptic sing-along song.

An important note: The original version of the lyrics contained the word "g*psy", which I've since learned is a racial slur, usually used as a catch-all to demean those of Roma, Sinte, and other marginalized groups. These groups suffer horrible discrimination and violence in countries all across Europe, and the romantic ideal of the carefree "g*psy" lifestyle is a pretty fiction created to distract from that ugly reality. Showing them as traveling from place to place because they love it covers up their reality of being forced from their homes, brutalized, murdered, and often simply made illegal to be of their ethnicity at all.

I was of the mistaken impression that the word "g*psy" simply meant "anybody who travels for a living and has no fixed abode." I've learned that you can't divorce a word from its history, particularly not when that word is still used to actively harm people. Whether I intend it or not, that history is still evoked if I use that word, and whether or not every single member of that group objects, if there are some who do, that is reason enough for me not to use it.

When this song got nominated for the Pegasus award for Best Travel Song, I realized it was going to get a lot of attention, and it was long past time I did the right thing. All online versions of the lyrics have been corrected. All recorded versions with the old lyric have been removed from the internet, and the CD is out of print. I decided I wanted to re-record the song and release it as a free download, so that anyone who'd bought the CD or the song before could replace the old version at no cost. I feel bad for having made money (regardless of the amount) from something offensive. This is a part of what I can do to make that right.

I chose the word "rovers" because I liked the extra bit of reference there; that in a world where we'd lost so much technology, including space exploration, a word that had once meant something technological had fallen back into more earthbound use.

I apologize to anyone that I offended with the old version of this song. I hope you enjoy the new version!

About the Recording

Tony:
I think Vixy's original intention was just to do a quick re-record of the song, with just guitar and voice, much the same way it was originally done on Shadowbeast. Of course I couldn't just leave it at that! Not with Betsy and Sunnie around. This one had to get the full treatment.

I started the usual way, with a tempo track and a guitar track, then Vixy laid down an immaculate lead vocal, as she always does. I followed the original version closely, though I deliberately added additional space at the beginning of the song and extended the gaps after each chorus, to leave room for Betsy and Sunnie to add their particular brand of awesome later.

After laying down the guitar and vocal tracks, I had the idea to use actual hoof beats to lead into the song. Everyone said I should use coconuts, but I just couldn't stand to do it that way: We'd never hear the end of the Python jokes. Besides, coconuts don't actually sound like real horse hooves on pavement. So the song opens with a recording of real horse hooves on pavement from a sound effects record, carefully edited to match the song's tempo. I used the slowest walk sound I could find, which was still much faster than the song's tempo, and of course, horses don't actually walk with perfect tempo, so there was a lot of editing to do. I also had to do some noise gate and multiband compression work to remove the airplane noise in the background of the sound effects recording (the song is supposed to be post-apocalyptic, i.e., no more airplanes, it's in the lyrics). Then there's the question of echo. The lyrics say that the hooves echo, but when you put echo or reverb onto a recording, it makes it sound like it's indoors, which is not what we were going for. I settled for a very subtle reverb with the emphasis on the early reflections, the kind of sound you might hear if the carriage were going beneath an underpass and the hoof beats were echoing off the concrete walls.

As with most of my experiments, I created an almost-finished proof-of-concept version of the hoofbeats before even telling Vixy about my idea. I find that when I have an idea of doing something unusual on a recording, it's easier to get her buy-in if she can hear what I'm talking about right off the bat. I was sure that if I had just asked, "can I add hoofbeats?" she would have said no, that's too cheesy. But with the hoofbeats already edited into place, it sounded great, and she loved it from the start.

I wasn't sure what to do about a rhythm track for the song. I knew I wanted one, but didn't know what would give me the feel I wanted. I briefly toyed with the idea of carrying the hoofbeats through the whole song, but then decided that really would be too cheesy. So I crossed my fingers and hoped that Betsy would come up with something good on her bodhrán, and of course, she did. Most of what she played was in the low frequency band, so I upped the treble on the guitar part to occupy the place of the high frequency half of the rhythm section.

Cello and fiddle are always the easy part: I just put some microphones in front of Betsy and Sunnie, and magic comes out. They never fail to delight and amaze me. What you hear on the recording is basically what they improvised on the spot in the studio. Of course, in Betsy's case, "improvised" means carefully laying down four incredible tracks of cello, because that's what the cello wanted to play, and we were powerless to stop it. When she added the third cello harmony part (the high bouncy one you hear in the second half of each chorus), I actually started giggling when she began laying down the tracks.

When working with incredible musicians like Betsy and Sunnie, I deliberately avoid trying to write any specific parts for them to play ahead of time. They always create something better on their own, thus making the song something special that bears their unique signature. I love the energy that comes from that process, you can hear it and feel it in the finished song. I always feel very honored that they want to play on our songs, and I'm thankful to have such amazing friends.