Ancestress

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“Ancestress” is the longest track on Fossora which, alongside “Sorrowful Soil”, is dedicated to Björk’s late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who… Read More

Sep. 22, 20221 viewer24.1K views

Ancestress Lyrics

[Verse 1: Björk]
My skull is my cathedral
Where this matrimort takes place
When I was a girl, she sang for me
In falsetto lullabies with sincerity
I thank her for her integrity

[Chorus 1: Björk, Björk & Sindri Eldon]
My ancestress' clock is ticking
Her once vibrant rebellion is fading
I am her hope-keeper
Assure hope is there
At, at all times

[Verse 2: Björk]
My ancestress has left all manners
Her pulsating skin rebelling
The doctors she despised
Placed a pacemaker inside her

[Chorus 2: Björk & Sindri Eldon]
When you're out of time
Oh, how you look back changes
Did you punish us for leaving?
Are you sure we hurt you?
Was it just not "living"?

[Verse 3: Björk]
She had idiosyncratic sense of rhythm
Dyslexia, the ultimate freeform
She invents words and adds syllables
Hand-writing, language all her own

[Chorus 3: Björk & Sindri Eldon]
I don't have that story in my mouth
When you die, you bring with you what you've given

[Verse 4: Björk]
The machine of her breathed all night
While she rested
Revealed her resilience
And then it, it didn't

[Chorus 4: Björk & Sindri Eldon]
You see with your own eyes
But hear with your mother's
There's fear of being absorbed
By the other

[Verse 5: Björk]
By now, we share the same flesh
As much as I tried to escape it
This is no mediocre debris
My ancestress this is

[Chorus 5: Björk & Sindri Eldon]
The odour of our final parting
Those have been
The perfumes of separation
For centuries
The perfumes of separation
For centuries
Ancestress

[Verse 6: Björk]
Nature wrote this psalm
It expands this realm
Translucent skin let go of
A cold palm embalmed

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About

“Ancestress” is the longest track on Fossora which, alongside “Sorrowful Soil”, is dedicated to Björk’s late mother, the environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who passed away in 2018.

While “Sorrowful Soil” is described as a kind of eulogy for Hildur, “Ancestress” is described as an epitaph, as she told Pitchfork:

I wrote pages and pages and pages, and edited it down, just to leave exactly the words I want to be there. If I was a priest, it’s what I would’ve said at the funeral.

On release, Björk said the song was probably inspired by an old Icelandic song called “Grafskrift”, which directly accounts for a person’s life, listing professions, partners and more, which she described as very “patriarchal”. “Ancestress” is a more feminine approach to the subject.

The seven-minute piece was released as the third single from Fossora, along with a music video directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, the video depicts a ritual funeral procession in the same valley where Hildur used to pick herbs. The song is also Björk’s first release singing with her son, the singer-songwriter Sindri Eldon.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

What did Björk say about "Ancestress"?

Verified Commentary

Björk

via Uncut Magazine

Having avoided funerals for 30 years, I had to think about it critically. My subconscious went to work and “Ancestress” come out. It looks like a very simple lyric. But every single word in it was like I had given birth to an ostrich egg, because it had to be right. It couldn’t be too sad, but it couldn’t be too happy. It couldn’t be sensational or melodramatic. It still had to have her severity or gravity.

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