Lai, a name turned into a chorus

Some songs need hundreds of words. Lai makes do with a few and a name. It carries my niece's, and its chorus turns it into a kind of magic formula: «Lara-li, loora-li, Lai».

What I like about this lyric is its economy. Between choruses, loose words in English appear, as if someone were letting them fall through the air: serene, veil, dream, shine, hush, glimmer, fade. They don't form sentences. They don't tell a story. They create a mood, like a room with the lights at half power and curtains moving.

Repeating a name

There's something very special about repeating the name of someone you love. You say it once and it's a call. You say it twenty times and it becomes something else: a way of protecting it, of celebrating it, of engraving it in the air. That's what this song does. Each round of the chorus sounds a little different depending on how you listen, softer, brighter, further away.

The sounds around the name, that lara-li, loora-li, have something of a children's game about them, of a made-up word that only makes sense to whoever says it. And in between, the ahs and oohs that wrap everything like cotton wool.

It's not a song for telling anything, or for shouting at a party. It's a song for just being. For letting it play while you look out of the window, while you write something lovely, while you think about the little people in your life who make you feel big.

Within PLANETA GAYFOLK, where there are plenty of lyrics with proper names for settling scores, I find it beautiful that there's one that uses a name only to love it. It's the other face of the project, the brightest one.

If you have someone whose name you'd like to turn into a chorus, dedicate this one to them. And if not, listen anyway: the glow is contagious.

The full lyrics are below. Listen on Spotify