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Netflix
I'm sure Woodkid's To Ashes and Blood planted itself into your head for a while after you heard it in Arcane Season 2, it is one of the most important songs in the show, and its message is clear even if you don't understand what the children choir sings – no wonder: the creators made a whole new language for this part. Here is what it says:
"Shuriman chant translated from an old prayer to the goddess Jan’ahrem:
Beyond these walls, the storm's fury grows
Over land and sea, the storm's fury grows
But I have nothing to fear!
For the blue bird is with me."
The soundtrack follows the epic battle between Jinx, Vi, Caitlyn, and Sevika, with Janna looking down on them with her stone face, although I associate it with Jayce, Heimerdinger, and Ekko's little trip (you know what I mean.)
Executive music producer Alex “Mako” Seaver shared the story behind the chant's creation with PCGamesN.
“Maybe midway through working on To Ashes and Blood, Christian [Linke, Arcane’s showrunner] was like ‘we should add something here.’ The whole concept of the song is that this is an ancient, otherworldly warning from the past. Most of the songs are written in the present through the character’s perspective, but this is not a song that belongs to any of these characters. It’s a song from a long time ago.”
But Seaver hadn't made up a whole new language before. So he went to Riot’s lore department and found someone who could do it.
“I got to watch his process, and then my process as a songwriter is looking for singable kinds of things, so as we’re going back and forth I’m taking sentences he’s written and going ‘I can work with this.’ We built it together.”
The “ridiculous” part was teaching children this nonexistent dialect, without them, the project could have “folded in on itself and imploded,” but they did great in the end.
“The whole point of all of these songs is to make the scene as good as you can,” he continues. “Christian was like ‘this is an action-packed sequence. Let’s make this soft, brooding song underneath the action,’ and that’s a recipe for disaster unless it works. I felt like it worked, but you never really know until you release it to an audience.”
Viewers falling in love with the song is one of Seaver's “proudest experiences across both seasons.” Considering its wild popularity, overtaken only by Twenty One Pilots' The Line probably, the effort was worth it.
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