The Official Emona Literary Services Playlist: Tres Brujas — The Sword
Music to Do Words Good to…
This post, along with the majority of subsequent posts about my Emona Literary Services™ playlist, is adapted from a series about music I originally posted on the Realmgard blog. I’ll be moving the majority of my more bloggy posts, particularly the ones revolving around me writing about music and other sorts of Pop Culture, to Substack and using the Realmgard blog primarily to post things immediately relevant to the Realmgard stories.
With that in mind, here’s the latest iteration of my very first playlist post.
Funnily enough, researching the original version of this post on the Realmgard blog was how I initially found out that one of my favourite bands, The Sword, broke up in 2022.
They have since announced an at least temporary reunion at the end of 2024 and into 2025.1
But, anyway, here's a song about witches — though, admittedly, it's less like scary Halloween/cartoon witches and more like Fantasy novel, quest-giver witches.
Cf., for example, the witch Ziroonderel — whose name, for all intents and purposes actually is "the witch Ziroonderel" from The King of Elfland's Daughter.
But, like, there's three of her. As we see here:
"Three witches you shall meet
Along the road to your fate:
The first at twilight, the second at night,
And the third at the coming of day."Lyrics via Genius.
The Sword has a following, but have never been a commercial powerhouse, though all but one of their albums did manage to chart on the Billboard 200.
I think my quick pitch for their music would be "Conan stories set to music — in some cases literally; a few of their songs are directly based on Conan stories, along with other Fantasy series.
Today's chosen song, Tres Brujas (Spanish for, as you may glean from the lyrics, "three witches") is from their 2010 concept album Warp Riders.
In brief, it's a Science Fantasy about a planet tidally-locked to its three suns so that one side is always day and one side is always night.
And unto this (see what I did there?), an archer named Ereth who finds a magic orb, travels across the planet and into space and ends up fighting some sort of evil space god. Admittedly, it's not entirely clear and The Sword clearly focused more on making good music than laying out the story in clear, concise prose.
Also, most of the supplementary material is apparently in the liner notes of the physical album, and I've only ever streamed it...
Tres Brujas is both the album's lead single and the story's opening, telling of Ereth's discovery of the the aforementioned orb, vision quest, and subsequent need to find the three witches mentioned in the title.
Take a listen here:
And my full Official Emona Literary Services™ playlist on Spotify is here:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Depending on how exactly that plays out, I may just decide to stop updating the band's current status whenever I revisit this post…