10. “The Scarlet Tide”
Videos by American Songwriter
The 76th Academy Awards were pretty much a coronation for The Return Of The King, the final installment of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy that made a gajillion dollars and employed half of New Zealand. Even if its lyrics had been written in Elvish, you knew that the Best Song honors that 2004 evening would go to the Rings theme song “Into The West,” sung by Annie Lennox. The two songs nominated from the Civil War-set Cold Mountain really never stood a chance, although one of them provided the unintentional comedy of Sting earnestly playing the hurdy-gurdy on stage.
The other of those two losing Cold Mountain songs was the gorgeous ballad “The Scarlet Tide,” written by Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett and performed on the soundtrack by Alison Krauss. Krauss’ haunting rendition of the song played over the movie’s end credits and inadvertently showed it up by summing up in three minutes all of the emotions and sentiments the filmmakers had labored two-and-a-half hours to express.
It would have been daunting to somehow outdo Krauss’ version, so Costello made the wisest choice possible when recording his own take to tack on to the end of his 2004 album, The Delivery Man: He played it simple. Accompanied by just a ukulele and the unmatchable harmonies of Emmylou Harris, Elvis sang a restrained and tender version of the song, and it’s just beautiful.
“The Scarlet Tide” is written from the perspective of a war widow who now needs to decide how to proceed with her life after suffering unimaginable loss. Her search for answers leads her to truths about human nature that only the beasts can see: “A little bird did sing/’Man has no choice/When he wants everything.’”
Costello takes time in the second part of the song to make points about warmongers and profiteers and the lives they ensnare, points that still resonate long after the guns of The Civil War were stilled: “Man goes beyond his own decisions/Gets caught up in the mechanism/Of swindlers who act like kings/And brokers who break everything.” Such timeless sentiments made it easy for Elvis to switch the lyrics to a more pointed anti-war message when he played the song on American tours.
The song’s chorus offers a sliver of uplift. After all, the line doesn’t say “We’ll succumb to the scarlet tide.” (That wouldn’t scan very well anyway.) It says, “We’ll rise above the scarlet tide,” offering a glimpse of the resilience of the human spirit even in the face of the greatest odds and in the depth of the deepest sorrow. The hobbits might have won the battle that Oscar night, but Costello and Burnett’s “The Scarlet Tide” easily wins the war as that rare movie song that still moves hearts and minds long after the credits have stopped rolling.
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