The UK based folk band māsa – who previously recorded as Currer Bell – have an album ‘Sailors and Insomniacs‘ out on August 5th, from which today’s song is taken. It’s a modern folk song very much drawing on tradition – it’d be easy to imagine ‘My Love Went To Sea’ was a centuries-old song of drowned sailors and lost love, if it were not for the mentions of sonar and diving equipment.
The band are siblings Faron and Merle who’s homeschooling experience allowed them to create a shared imaginary world brimming with characters and scenes to fill their storytelling songs. The importance of this bond is behind the name: māsa means ‘sister’ in Latvian, the language of their great-grandmother, whose life-story and vivid imagination remain a treasured legacy for the duo. Of ‘My Love Went To Sea‘ they say: “This song is about that feeling of desperately wanting to connect but failing. Sometimes people we love seem unreachable; they’ve gone to a deeper, darker place where we cannot touch them. It can feel hopeless, like trying to talk with someone on the ocean bed when you’re sailing on the surface. But you keep trying anyway, hoping that one day, you’ll pull them up from the depths.”
