Words that say nothing: «Dreams Drift Afar», humming and the chorus of waiting

Some songs you understand with your head and some you understand with your chest. «Dreams Drift Afar» belongs to the second kind. If you look for a story in it, you won't find one. No ex, no narcissist, no stairwell, no club. There's a long murmur with the mouth closed, a syllable that keeps repeating and, in between, five very short phrases in English that paint a night.

Because the lyrics are so brief, I'm copying them in full here, exactly as they are published on gayfolkplanet.com, without changing a single letter. And I'll copy them again further down, because some lyrics read differently the second time.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, whispers softly call.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, night shadows fall.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana nanananananaaaaa,

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananaaaa, dreams drift afar.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, stars blink and sigh.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, under the moonlit sky.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana nanananananaaaaa,

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananaaaa, dreams drift afar.

The planet's journal already has a lovely reading of this song as a lullaby, with Lorca, the bogeyman and the lecture the poet gave on cradle songs. I want to look at something else here. More than half of these lyrics mean nothing, in the dictionary sense. They're mmms and nananas. And yet nobody who hears it fails to understand it. This post is about that: words that say nothing, and why music has been using them for centuries.

Sixteen lines and five phrases

I'll start by counting, because counting helps you see. The lyrics have sixteen lines. Eight are exactly the same: the same murmur of four clusters of m's, like four breaths. The other eight always begin with nanana and, in six of them, end with a few words of English. In the remaining two there are no words at all: just a nanana stretched until it loses its shape.

The words that are left would fit on a napkin. Whispers softly calling. Night shadows falling. Stars that blink and sigh. The sky under the moon. And one phrase that appears twice, at the end of each half, and gives the song its title: dreams drifting far away.

It's an extremely rare proportion in the catalogue. Most of my lyrics have words to spare, piling up names, insults, references to the telly. Here it's the opposite. Take away the murmurs and the nananas, and the whole lyric comes to seventeen words. Seventeen. Fewer than the titles of some of my songs.

A miniature poem

Those seventeen words, read on their own, work as a tiny poem. They rhyme: call with fall, sigh with sky. They have a progression: first something calls, then night falls, then the stars, then the whole sky. It's a shot that keeps widening, from the close to the immense, the way a room seems to grow around you as you lie there just before sleep.

And they have a refrain that rhymes with nothing. The title phrase is left on its own, unpaired, at the end of each half. I like that. Dreams that drift far away have nothing to rhyme with because they've already gone. The line is left hanging, just as consciousness hangs in that second before sleep.

The word afar has its charm too. In modern English almost nobody uses it in conversation. It's a word from old poems, folk songs, fairy tales. A single archaic word is enough to make the song sound like something from long ago, even though it was made with today's tools.

Stars that sigh

Two lines of the little poem deserve a pause. The first opens the series: «whispers softly call». It doesn't say who is whispering or whom they're calling. It's a call with no sender, like when you're about to fall asleep and think you hear your name in another room. The song begins with someone, or something, calling. And so quietly you can barely hear it.

The second is the one with the stars: «stars blink and sigh». Stars blink; anyone who has looked at the sky on a summer night knows that. But they also sigh, and that's something else. It gives a heavenly body a human gesture, tired, almost melancholy. In 1856 the English critic John Ruskin gave that device a rather unkind name: the pathetic fallacy, the poets' habit of attributing feelings to nature. Ruskin saw it as an excess. A century and a half later it is still one of song's most used tools.

In lyrics this short, that sigh of the stars changes everything. Without it, the night would be a landscape. With it, the night feels. And if the stars sigh, whoever is listening can sigh too without feeling silly. It's a very discreet way of giving permission.

Notice the order, too. The whispers call, and then the shadows fall. The stars sigh, and then the moonlit sky appears. Each pair of lines moves from a small sound to a big image. First the ear, then the eye. Just like the experience of night itself, when with your eyes still shut you hear things, and then, opening them, you see the room is full of moonlight.

Writing seventeen words

Writing such short lyrics has its own difficulty. When a song has lots of words, a weak line hides among the others. When it has seventeen, every one of them counts. You can't put in a filler word because it shows. You can't explain anything because there's no room. You have to choose.

Ernest Hemingway argued something similar for prose. In «Death in the Afternoon», his 1932 book on bullfighting, he compared good writing to an iceberg: only part of it shows, and the dignity of its movement comes from everything that stays under the water. If the writer truly knows what he is leaving out, the reader feels it even though it isn't written.

«Dreams Drift Afar» works like a very small iceberg. What shows are five phrases about the night. What stays underneath is whatever each listener wants to put there: insomnia, a long wait, a goodbye, a child who won't go to sleep. The humming is the water. It covers what isn't said and lets through just enough.

As a lyricist, I find that exercise fascinating because it goes against my habits. My songs tend to be talkative, sometimes to excess. This one forces me to trust that the murmur and the production will say what I don't write. In a piece made with artificial intelligence that trust is literal: the lyrics set the frame, and the generated sound has to fill the room.

Syllables that don't mean anything

Every musical tradition has its empty syllables. Flamenco has refrains of lerele and ay that don't translate. Spanish folk songs have their tralará, their larailo, their ea. The songs of many Native American peoples use syllables with no lexical meaning, which ethnomusicologists call vocables, and which can matter as much as words. Scotland has puirt à beul, mouth music, a tradition of dance tunes made with the mouth when there were no instruments to hand.

None of those syllables is filler. They do very specific jobs. They hold the rhythm. They leave the melody room to breathe. They let anyone join in even if they don't know the words. And above all, they say what words can't reach. A flamenco ay means nothing in the dictionary and everything in the throat of whoever lets it out.

The nanana of «Dreams Drift Afar» belongs to that family. It isn't that words were missing. It's that, in that gap, words would have been too much.

Louis Armstrong drops the paper

In 1926 Louis Armstrong recorded a number called «Heebie Jeebies» with his Hot Five. Midway through, instead of the lyrics, he let loose a string of nonsense syllables, rhythmic and playful. It's one of the first famous recordings of scat, the jazz technique of improvising with invented syllables as if the throat were a trumpet.

Legend has it that Armstrong dropped the lyric sheet in the middle of the session and, unable to stop, carried on improvising. It's probably more legend than fact, and he enjoyed telling it. But the legend says something true about scat: it turns up where words fall away. When there's no paper, the music remains.

Then came Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway with his "hi-de-hi-de-ho", and generations of musicians who turned nonsense syllables into a virtuoso art. Scat is showmanship, speed, play. The humming of «Dreams Drift Afar» sits at the opposite end. It doesn't run, it drifts. It doesn't show off, it rocks you. But it shares one certainty with Armstrong: you can say a great deal with sounds that are in no dictionary.

The Humming Chorus

In 1904 Giacomo Puccini's «Madama Butterfly» premiered in Milan. At the end of the second act comes a scene many consider among the most beautiful in all opera. The heroine, Cio-Cio-San, has seen the ship of the man she has been waiting for for three years sail into the harbour. She dresses, fills the house with flowers and sits down to wait for him, with her son and her maid, as night falls.

And then, from offstage, comes a chorus that doesn't utter a single word. It's the famous Humming Chorus, the «coro a bocca chiusa». An unseen choir murmurs a melody with closed lips while the night passes and Butterfly keeps watch. No text is needed. The murmur is the waiting.

When I first heard the mmms of «Dreams Drift Afar», I thought of that scene. The night shadows falling, the stars blinking, someone awake while the world switches off. Humming with your mouth closed has something of a vigil about it. It's what you do when you don't want to wake anyone, or when there's no one to talk to, or when what you feel won't fit in a sentence. Puccini knew it, and he put it at the exact moment his heroine could say nothing more.

The nanana everybody knows

The nanana has a more popular history. In 1968 the Beatles released «Hey Jude», a song over seven minutes long whose second half is mostly a nanana repeated over and over as more instruments and more people pile in. Paul McCartney wrote it to comfort John Lennon's young son during his parents' divorce, and the wordless ending is what everyone remembers.

A year later, in 1969, the group Steam put out «Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye», which ended up as a stadium chant in half the world. Ever since, nanana has been the chorus of people who don't know the words: weddings, farewells, the terraces. It's the sound of the crowd. A syllable everyone can say at once.

In «Dreams Drift Afar» the nanana loses that crowd. It's no longer the terraces or the party. It's intimate, almost a secret. But it keeps the best of its history: it leaves no one out. It doesn't matter if you don't speak English, don't know the words, or are hearing it for the first time. By the second time round, you're in.

What the body does when it hums

Humming with your mouth closed has physical effects that science has started to measure. In 2002 two researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Eddie Weitzberg and Jon Lundberg, published a study in a respiratory medicine journal with a very blunt title: humming greatly increases nasal nitric oxide. When you hum, air vibrates in the nose and sinuses and is exchanged much faster than when you breathe silently.

There's something simpler and more obvious too. To hum, you have to let the air out slowly. The out-breath lengthens, the breathing settles, the body's rhythm slows. That's why so many relaxation practices use a closed-mouth buzz, and why mothers and fathers all over the world have hummed their babies to sleep long before anyone offered an explanation.

I don't want to turn a song into a remedy, because it isn't one. But I like to think its form has a bodily logic. Eight lines of murmur are eight long out-breaths. Whoever listens closely ends up, almost without meaning to, breathing in time with it.

There's an older reason as well. The closed-mouth murmur is one of the first sounds we make in life. Before they say words, babies murmur, babble, repeat syllables like na or ma just for the pleasure of hearing them. In 1959 the linguist Roman Jakobson asked why, in so many of the world's languages, the words for mother and father sound so alike, and his answer had to do with exactly that: they are the easiest sounds for a mouth that is just starting out. The nanana and mmm of this song go back to that place before language. You don't need to have studied anything to recognise it. The body remembers on its own.

Listening without understanding

Most people who listen to planet Gayfolk speak Spanish. For a good part of that audience, the five English phrases in this song are also, in a way, sounds. They catch the drift, they recognise words like night or dreams, but they don't translate word for word. And that's fine.

Spain has a famous example of this. In 2002 the group Las Ketchup released «Aserejé», a worldwide hit whose chorus is the way a character in the song reproduces, without knowing any English, the opening of «Rapper's Delight», The Sugarhill Gang's 1979 track. "Aserejé, ja, deje" is English heard and handed back as pure music. Half of Europe danced to it without wondering what it meant.

That experience, enjoying a song in a language you don't fully understand, is very common and very undervalued. It makes you listen differently. You notice the sound of the vowels, the rhythm, the breathing. «Dreams Drift Afar» seems written for that way of listening. If you understand the English, you get a tiny poem. If you don't, you get a night.

Dreams adrift

The title phrase has a very well-chosen verb. To drift is to go wherever the current takes you, with no course. In English it's also used for falling asleep: to drift off, to slip into sleep little by little. So dreams that drift afar are at once the dreams that get away and the very act of falling asleep.

That ambiguity suits a song made of murmurs. It could be a lullaby walking someone towards sleep. It could be a farewell to dreams, in the sense of wishes slipping further away. It could be both, which is what tends to happen at a certain age: you fall asleep and, as you do, you think about everything you wanted that is no longer quite so close.

In my lyrics, dreams usually have a proper name and a sell-by date. Not here. Here the dreams leave without saying where to, and the song doesn't try to hold on to them. It lets them go with a nanana. There's a kind of calm in that which doesn't appear much in the rest of the catalogue.

The lyrics, once more

I promised I'd copy them again, and here they are, whole and unchanged. Read them now knowing that each line of m's is a long out-breath, that the nanana is a cousin of the one in «Hey Jude» and of the flamenco lerele, and that the five English phrases are a seventeen-word poem.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, whispers softly call.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, night shadows fall.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana nanananananaaaaa,

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananaaaa, dreams drift afar.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, stars blink and sigh.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana, under the moonlit sky.

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananana nanananananaaaaa,

Mmmmmmm mmmmm mmmmmmmmm mmmm,

Nananaaaa, dreams drift afar.

Read like this, the second time, you notice something the first reading misses. The two halves are almost identical, but not quite. In the first, night falls. In the second, night is already there, with stars and moon. The song doesn't move forward in its story because it has no story. It moves forward into the dark, little by little, like eyes adjusting to a room without light.

A pause on the liberation album

«Dreams Drift Afar» belongs to the second album of the trilogy, the one named after the song «El día de la liberación» (Liberation Day). It's an album with plenty of noise, with loud goodbyes and break-ups being celebrated. In the middle of all that, this piece works like a room in half-light.

On the singles list its previous neighbour is «Un puñetazo al día» (A punch a day), and the next one is «Dubái». Going from a title like that to a closed-mouth murmur feels like a deliberate contrast, as if after the blow you needed to lie down for a while.

It's not the only quiet song on the planet. «Holy Stillness» is a lullaby too, with a different tenderness and a different stillness. «Whisper Fade» and «Drift Away» share key words of this title, the whisper and the drift. And «Sunshine» is its closest relative, another song made almost entirely of humming, though that one looks towards the day and this one towards the night.

Who this song is for

For anyone who can't sleep and doesn't want to be told anything. For anyone lying awake while someone sleeps beside them, trying not to make a sound. For anyone who has waited a whole night for someone, like Butterfly, and knows some kinds of waiting don't fit into words.

And for anyone who thinks a song with hardly any lyrics is half a song. It isn't. It's something else: a way of saying what can't be said any other way. Armstrong did it with the paper on the floor, Puccini with an unseen choir, the Beatles with seven minutes of nanana. «Dreams Drift Afar» does it with seventeen words and a murmur. That's all it needs.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Dreams Drift Afar» about? A quiet night told almost without words: whispers, falling shadows, stars and moon, and dreams drifting far away. It's a mood piece, closer to a lullaby than to a song with a story.

Why do the lyrics have so many mmms and nananas? Because the song is built on humming. Those syllables hold the rhythm and the melody and say what words can't reach, like jazz scat or the lerele and tralará refrains of Spanish folk music.

What does «Dreams Drift Afar» mean? Something like "dreams float far away". In English, the verb drift is also used for slowly falling asleep.

Which album is it on? On «El día de la liberación», the second album of the Gayfolk trilogy.

Why does this post copy the lyrics twice? Because they're very short and make more sense read twice: once before the explanation and once after.

Who makes this song? Mike Sain't Louis, lyricist, composer and music producer from Madrid, the first AI songwriter. He writes the lyrics and directs the production; the music and vocals are generated with artificial intelligence.