The way they draw from history and myth, you could argue every Gawain and the Green Knight song is a ghost story. The Brooklyn chamber-folk duo’s latest, “Lick,” just ups the spectral ante with a sentimental, snow-shrouded tale of a spirit who falls for the woman living in the apartment he haunts. “I’ve been on a more literal ghost kick lately, maybe because I’ve been working at a cemetery,” says singer and guitarist Alexia Antoniou. “But I’ve always been interested in ghosts for the same reason I think a lot of people are—you want there to be something about people that death can’t erase.”
To the song’s disembodied narrator, who’s been dead for nearly a century, there’s something just as attractive about being alive. Rustling the woman’s dirty sheets and rattling the sleeping pills in her cupboard, the ghost becomes infatuated partly because she reminds him of a past love—but just as much, Antoniou says, for the trappings of mortality. “I imagine even watching her blow her nose must be pretty exciting to this ghost, as a human bodily thing.”
Duo partner Mike O’Malley brings the wistful verses to life with Irish bouzouki and phantasmal Mellotron, but Antoniou leaves the pair’s fate up to listener’s interpretation. She only hints at the woman’s own story from a ghost-eye view, and she signs off with the spirit’s ominous wondering: ”And in the spring, do you think you or I will be here?” “My impulse in the past was towards very explicit lyrics, and I’m having fun being a little more impression-y,” she says. “Is the ghost chasing her away, and she moves out? Is the ghost running out of ghost time, and he’ll be gone come spring? Or is there something menacing in the ghost’s obsession, and will she be dead by the time the snow melts? Who’s to say?”
If you find yourself possessed by a spirit of curiosity, you can stream “Lick” below.
