Prarthana Lyrics by Daddy

Flying through that sky,
arms spread wide,
the song that plays in the world of the gods,
I searched for it here in this world.

Wrapped up in song,
unable to bear it,
wrapped up in its warmth.

What my life longed for,
what I offered with love,
like the stars of the night,
became a lamp,
this world of mine.

In my ocean of singing,
my ears are stirred and soothed,
the playing hands beckoned to me.

That song held within the heart,
the song tells its story,
the rhythm it gave is what set my heart beating,
that is when peace drew near.

Wrapped up in song,
unable to bear it,
wrapped up in its warmth.

This is a song about music itself, and about a singer who went looking for it. The voice here is someone who flies up into the sky with arms thrown open, chasing a melody he believes belongs to the world of the gods, and then comes back down to search for that same heavenly sound here on earth. It is less a love song to a person than a love song to music, the kind of feeling a musician has when a tune moves through him and he cannot let it go.

The arc is one of being slowly taken over. He starts out reaching, searching, and then the music wraps around him until he can barely hold it, caught in its warmth. What his whole life had longed for, what he gave himself to with love, finally becomes light, and the image he reaches for is the night stars turning into a lamp. In Sinhala song the lamp (pahana) is the steady, sacred little flame, the one lit at the shrine, so saying his life’s longing “became a lamp” means the music became something holy and calming that lights up his whole world.

The imagery keeps circling back to sound as something almost physical. He calls his singing an ocean, a sea he is swimming in, and the playing of instruments becomes a pair of hands that beckon him closer. When he says the rhythm “set my heart beating,” he means it literally carried his life, the pulse of the drum and the pulse of his own heart became the same thing. That is the moment peace finally comes near.

By the end you are left with the feeling of a person who found what he was looking for not in another person but in music, and who is now so wound up in it that he has no wish to be free of it. The song is the comfort, the warmth, and the light all at once, and he is content to stay wrapped inside it.