Takata as the Hollows oracle: GBU read-along to cp 8

It was right about during GBU that I realized Takata, first mentioned in DWW as a way to ground Rachel in the real world (who doesn’t have a favorite music artist?) was going to be important by the time the books ended. I was starting to think about a three book series, and Takata had already begun to take shape in my mind as Rachel’s birth father. But I had decided, if I was going to play the “I’m your father” card, I was going to have to put the clues out early, and faint–hence the drips and drabs of it in Takata’s lyrics.

It took almost six books, but I managed to create in Takata’s lyrics something that could both foreshadowed Rachel’s ultimate future as a demon as well as her hidden past. I was never able to bring more than a phrase or two into the actual texts, but I did write them all out, and if you look through hindsight at them, you can see Takata’s shame and regret for having given his son and then his daughter to the woman he loved to be raised by his best friend from college. Sift the clues from the dust, from my lives, of my will. / I loved you then. I love you still. It still gives me pause, that regret that he gave her away, and he was telling Rachel, even then, that the clues and hints to her future and past were there in his music–if she would just slow down an listen.

You can see the lyrics in their entirety at the website [lyrics] One of the things that hurt the most when CW lost interest in the Hollows was the chance that Takata’s lyrics might have been brought to glorious life. Takata is the watcher, the one who knew everything–bound to silence by a promise he made to the woman he loved. Even as he ached.

Maybe someday.