I was angry at the whole fucking situation. And there wasn't time to sort it out. I wouldn't say that it's a happy song, but it does have a wry sense of humour. Macabre, really - a black comedy about this guy who takes a corpse out to sea to bury it. It set a mass of echoes off in my mind about the way that the Norse would float their dead out on the ocean and set them on fire.
Birds symbolise death in myth, certainly - in Jungian terms.
Once you start accepting these archetypal images they just keep occurring. The fragments that they're built from are from the subconscious. The art of putting them together was crafted, but the inspiration was very natural, almost automatic.