Mystery

Album: Sugaring Season (2012)
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Songfacts®:

  • Beth Orton closes her fifth album, Sugaring Season, with this offer of solace and comfort. The album title serves as a metaphor for the ten songs on the set. Orton told The Sun: "The term 'Sugaring Season' refers to the time in the late winter or early spring in New England and elsewhere, when they tap the maple trees to make maple syrup. In the cold nights and warm days, the sap flows… it is very much a time of reckoning and of introspection and darkness and light. It takes a lot of sap to make a little bit of sugar."

    Orton's husband, American folk singer Sam Amidon, is from the New England state of Vermont and they consequently spend a lot of time there.
  • The lyric, "Oh please don't stand a mood apart" was borrowed from Robert Frost's 1947 short poem, A Mood Apart. ("I stopped my song and almost heart. For any eye is an evil eye. That looks in onto a mood apart." ) According to Orton, Frost's poem, "uses nature to capture a sense of 'innocence regained,'" which is one of the themes of Sugaring Season. (Source The Independent).
  • Here are a few more songs on our database that reference the poetry of Robert Frost:

    "Uncle John's Band" by Grateful Dead.
    "Stay Gold" by The Big Pink.
    "Dead Man's Curve" by Jan & Dean.

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