Wild Fields

Album: Crooked Wing (2025)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Wild Fields" is the sixth track on Crooked Wing, the 2025 return after a six-year gap of These New Puritans, comprising brothers Jack and George Barnett. The song title comes from an old historical name for the region now known as Ukraine.

    Jack Barnett told Uncut magazine it's not actually a song about the war torn country, "but you can't help but respond to what's around you." He cites William Blake as a role model for this kind of thing: able to talk about the political rumblings of his own day while simultaneously tackling concepts like eternity and paradise, as if the two were items on the same shopping list.
  • The track ends with the words "come down from crystal heavens above," which Jack Barnett revealed is a direct quotation from William Byrd's lament for his fellow 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis.

    When he Googled the reference to verify its accuracy, Barnett was bombarded with advertisements about crystal meth withdrawal.
  • Jack Barnett produced the song with Graham Sutton, who had previously worked on the band's acclaimed albums Hidden (2010) and Field of Reeds (2013). The track is steeped in the album's favored palette: organs, bells and pitched percussion.

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