Cancerous Winter

**Genre**

"Cancerous Winter" is a song written by Mikaela Thorn and recorded under her alias ThornBrain. It was released on her fourth album, *Worldbuilder*.

## About

The song is a guitar-focused Post-Punk/New Wave track inspired by the work of Johnny Marr and Daniel Earwicker. It is about mourning the death of one's heroes, inspired by the multiple surprise celebrity deaths that began happening circa-2016, which became more visibly frequent after the death of one of Thorn's favorite musicians, David Bowie. Thorn came up with the title in 2016 after Bowie, musician Lemmy Kilmister, and actor Alan Rickman all died of cancer within the same Winter, though more celebrity deaths would follow from other causes. The final verse of the song changes to expressing anger at celebrities who abused their fame and power to sexually assault fans and colleagues, inspired by the #MeToo movement, referring less to a literal death than to Thorn expressing "you're dead to me" to these abusers. Its meaning within the story of the album is kept vague, though Thorn has said that it's part of the main character's struggles that eventually lead her to punching her computer monitor in frustration, hinting that she had been disappointed in or abused by someone she considered a hero.

Like "Competition for a Bad Life", Thorn began writing most of the song during the recording of *Buried Secrets & Old Lies*, but she didn't get far enough to record it for the album or to consider it for *Quaero* an an outtake. The chord structure was written in 2011 contemporaneous with *The Right Way to do Everything*, but Thorn couldn't find a good use for it before *Worldbuilder*. The third verse cannibalizes the lyrics from an incomplete song called "Kill Your Heroes, Make it Even", which would have been a Dance Punk track inspired by Post-Punk band The Pop Group.

The line "Loss of a hero to the mercy seat" is a reference to "Mercy Seat" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and "No heroes anymore" is paraphrased from "No More Heroes" by The Stranglers. The second half of the first and second verses were written to carry over a word from each previous line.

## Lyrics

This is a record of mourning

A house of memory

This here will serve as a warning

Excess or anxiety

No more breaths in the morning

Breaths know not to repeat

Hard to know what to think of them

Hard to think you will never meet

Hard to meet or accept the loss

Loss of a hero to the mercy seat

No one was ready for

The cancerous winter

No heroes anymore

And no one to let them go, no

This is a record of wallow

A house of fretfulness

How likely are you to follow

Circumstantial evidence

No choice now but to wait

Wait for the word to go out

Out of chances to make a change

Out of changes to bring about

About now that the word comes in

Word of another permanent blackout

No one was ready for

The cancerous winter

No heroes anymore

And no one to let them go, no

This is a record of contempt

A house of disappointment

This here will serve as our policy

Keep your fucking hands off of me

You don't change the world, you remake it

You don't blaze a trail, you take it

You don't stand on the shoulders of giants

You dig your heels in a corpse

Kill your heroes, make it even

We'll rip you out by force

No one was ready for

The cancerous winter

No heroes anymore

And no one to let them go, no

This is a record of mourning

A house of memory

This here will serve as a warning

Keep your fucking hands off of me