Little Bird of Heaven

The song is built on a single image. The narrator walks out of a back door and kicks an old can for miles before reading what is written on its side: there is a little bird of heaven in your hand. Love, the lyric goes, is a fragile thing, and it is hard to fly on broken wings; the narrator has lost his ticket to the promised land. The advice is to keep the bird close and hold on to it while you can, and the last verse, with its fallen hearts and fallen leaves and starlings on broken trees, says that everyone needs a place to land.

Scanlan’s biography calls the song the centerpiece of Joyce Carol Oates’s novel of the same name, published by Ecco in 2009. Other recordings include 4 by the group 4Evergreen (Chickadee, 2007), where Nel Kennedy sings the lead and the song is credited to Scanlan, and Solas’s All These Years (2016), on which Mairead Phelan is credited.