Song by the
Irish band
The Frames, from their fourth
album For the Birds. The song has a quiet but characteristic
bass line, and echoes the uneasy theme of the song: the
scarlet fever consuming a husband and wife as they lie in their beds together. The songwriter
Glen Hansard tells live audiences how he was watching a
film on the subject at the time he
composed the song. It is almost 7 minutes in length; after the first 3 minutes, during which the
lyrics are sung, there is almost 2 minutes of the same chord repeated, with a very gradual
crescendo throughout, until, for the final 2 minutes, the song bursts into a
cacophony of sound with a
repetitive, endless melody on distorted
guitar.
(Lyrics removed by editor for © infringement.)