Gayu Gee Athithe Lyrics by Mariazelle Goonetilleke

The songs we sang in days gone by drifted on and on and floated away
In this new world a new sweetness of song will flow
searching for the rhythm of the heartbeat…//

The strings of the moonlit guitar, in the moment I was lost in it
body and mind will sing, a new sweetness of song will flow
The strings of the moonlit guitar, in the moment I was lost in it
a new sun has risen on a new world…

The songs we sang…

The songs sung long ago still flow through our hearts
it was from those old strings of song that today’s songs were born
The songs sung long ago still flow through our hearts
a new sun has risen on a new world…

The songs we sang…//

This is a song about songs, a piece that celebrates music itself and the way it carries on from one generation to the next. There is no lovers’ story here. The voice is simply a singer thinking about where music comes from and where it is going, and how the old songs and the new ones are part of the same unbroken stream.

It opens with the songs of the past, the ones people sang long ago, drifting away like something carried on water. But they are not lost. In this new world, the singer says, a fresh sweetness of song will keep flowing, still chasing the same thing the old songs chased, the rhythm of the human heartbeat. That last image is the quiet heart of the whole song. Music, in this telling, is just the heartbeat set to melody, so every age finds the same pulse and gives it a new tune.

The middle verse turns warm and personal for a moment. The “moonlit guitar,” the strings of an instrument played under the moon, is the moment the singer gets carried away and lost in the playing, and out of that body and mind both start to sing. In Sinhala song the moon usually stands for a calm, gentle beauty, so picturing a guitar bathed in moonlight gives the music a soft, almost magical glow. And then the line that returns like a refrain, “a new sun has risen on a new world,” meaning each new era of music is like a fresh dawn, the same light, a new morning.

The last verse makes the song’s real point plain. The songs of long ago still flow in our hearts, and it was from those old “strings of song” that today’s songs were born. One generation hands its music to the next, and nothing is truly left behind. What the listener is left holding is a gentle, hopeful thought, that the music we love now grew out of the music our parents and grandparents loved, and that the singing will simply keep going, rising again like a new sun every time.