Seven Daughters

Daniel Thomas

THE SWOON wrote the song SEVEN DAUGHTERS in 1991. I remember working on the lyrics with my girlfriend-at-the time on NEW YEAR’S EVE 1991, one full year after THE SWOON’s official END OF THE WORLD PARTY (New Year’s Eve 1990). In retrospect, the end of the world in 1990 turned out to be underwhelming but strangely prescient. A full year later, on the eve of 1991, we were all still there, but everything had changed.

That was a long time ago in a galaxy six blocks from where I still live. The girl who helped me write the lyrics to SEVEN DAUGHTERS ultimately brought four human souls (three sons and one daughter) into the world (not the seven daughters for which the lyrics aspired). She helped me put the story together and also wrote the chorus, leading off with “Seven is a blessing,” a mathematical and spiritual theorem she acquired from Chabad Lubavitch Judaism–a religious worldview into which she ultimately also swept me and which subsequently plunged me into the world of Messianic Jewish apocalypticism where I still tread water in the midst of the disintegration of Western Civilization.

SEVEN DAUGHTERS is a song about the human potential within the feminine principle. (Really it is. Not just blowing smoke here.) Maybe that sounds unlikely, but at that time, we were submersed in a culture torn apart over the question of human life in the womb. On this issue, my female friend and I stood apart from pretty much everyone in the entire world with whom we grooved. While everyone around us took the opposite view, we believed in the transcendent sanctity of life from conception. That’s really what SEVEN DAUGHTERS was trying to say. Not a patriarchal hegemony or masculine preference, rather, a subtle human story about the common source of life.

Some 33 years later, Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT) combined with the power of Dalle3 allowed me to easily create the images I originally imagined to illustrate the narrative of the song. The song is quaintly outdated in an an era when gender distinctions and traditional roles have become passé. It belongs to NEW YEAR’S EVE 1991 and not to 2024 when we seem to truly peer into an abyss, the bottom of which, looks to Jews like the END OF THE WORLD.

But wait. There’s more!

When THE SWOON recorded this song in the fall of 1991, only a few months after the firstborn child of the above mentioned friend had entered this WORLD OF CONCEALMENT, our guitar player and sublime muse, Austin Dacey, lamented the absence of keyboards and a jazzy piano solo in the bridge of the song. We had lost our pianist a year earlier, so we had to go with what we had at the time.

Blessed thanks to the blind Messianic musician TROY MITHCELL for providing the missing piano solo three decades later in this completely unauthorized and unapproved version of the song. You heard it only only here: