Long have I obsessed over the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the older I become, the more I love all things Middle-earth. There have been a few nods to Tolkien in my music before – especially in the lyrics of The Iron Crown (the first track on The Gathering Tide album from 2016), which was inspired by Tolkien’s poem Mythopoeia. It was perhaps inevitable that at some point a more directly related Tolkien/music project would appear!
2021 was an incredibly insane year for me on a personal level, and I didn’t really get time to do any Gathering Tide music. I did however make a (possibly foolish) promise to a couple of Tolkien-scholar friends that I’d have a crack at writing and recording a sea shanty that could have been sung by the most famous seafarers of Middle-earth, the Númenóreans.
If you’ve only heard my music with The Gathering Tide, this may seem something of an odd fit. But in my previous band Zeptepi I recorded numerous shanties – both traditional and some new compositions – most notably The Swiftsure (from the 2013 Coming Up For Air LP), which tells the tragic story of one of my many sailor ancestors, and the old classic Haul Away Joe (2013, also from the Coming Up For Air LP).
Anyway, I finished this project in January 2022, and you can hear the results on Youtube – Bound for Númenor.
If you’d like to download the track, you can do so here:
Bound for Númenor – MP3 version (6.9MB)
Bound for Númenor – WAV file (30.3MB)