The Sweetness
A song of emptying and becoming — three figures at the frostline who take what a man most loves until nothing remains but the hollow where a life used to be. This is the old story of N'Kai, who walked into the cold to forget, and instead was made into something that remembers everything.
From Chapter #32 of Hush Song - The First Dream
The Last Mammoth
As the ice closes around it, the mammoth drifts back to the world before winter—endless grass, bright sky, and the thunder of its kin across the plains.
When the Apple Blossoms Fall
Lyrics by Karen Lami
This is Joseph’s song for Amanda — the one he never meant to write, the one that rose up in the orchard after she was gone. “When the Apple Blossoms Fall” carries the sound of a man moving through familiar rituals with unfamiliar emptiness beside him.
The blossoms drift the way her laughter used to drift across the barnyard, soft and unexpected, and every petal feels like a memory he can’t quite hold. It’s a song of missing someone in the quiet places, of tending the land the way she taught him, and of learning how to keep going when the world still looks the same but nothing feels the same.
The Keeper Tree
This is a song about a woman who has already chosen. There is flannel worn soft from years of washing, boots cracked and molded to her feet, air thickened like honey because the orchard is ready to receive what it has been waiting for. She walks not in grief but in arrival — toward the Keeper Tree ahead of her, its bark warm and pulsing, the crows already gone silent. The song ends where her tracks end, at the base of the tree. Still held, still dreaming in some form the living cannot name.
From Chapter #17 - Hush Song - The Second Dream
The Hollow Man
Lyrics by Karen Lami
He plays the open mics and asks if anyone's seen her — red hair, silver rings, a voice like warm gravel. No one has. No one ever has. He writes her name in setlists and notebooks and on napkins at the bar. He's certain she's real. He's certain he loves her. He's certain Boston is where she's been waiting. Behind him, a farmhouse. A cat. A woman whose face he almost remembers. The almost is the part that follows him down every street he walks.
From Chapter #60 of Hush Song - The Second Dream
Kimberly walks with the Mammoth in the Worldforest
From Chapters #73 and #74 of Hush Song - The Second Dream
Threaded (Not Ira)
A song from Hush Song - The Second Dream
A moment caught between memory and touch — where someone new carries the echo of someone lost.
This piece explores the way a voice, a laugh, or a familiar gesture can pull the past back into the room, blurring the line between haunting and desire.
From the poem:
“You speak in his cadence,
and I flinch from the sound—
a laugh I once loved
now circling back around.”
If you’ve ever felt the past reach through the present, or recognized someone by the way they almost resemble a ghost you once loved, this one will resonate.
From Chapter #80 of Hush Song - The Second Dream
The music is free. The story behind it is yours whenever you want it.
Hush Song - The First Dream by Lianne Adams begins five thousand years ago. The book follows one man's unmaking and the strange, terrible thing that rises in his place: a being who walks between memory and forgetting, hunger and gift, the ancient world and the one still dreaming itself into existence.
Hush Song - The Second Dream takes place in rural Maine, where an ancient being and a young woman are bound together across thirty years in ways neither of them chose. Both are available on Amazon. Same world. Deeper in.
(The Kindle Versions will cost you less than a cup of coffee for both, and if you have Kindle Unlimited, they are free!)