Frontman Keith Fay kommentiert: “The Hawthorn tree is a fairy tree, you will see them all over Ireland growing in strange unlikely places where other trees would have been cut down. It is extremely unlucky to cut down a hawthorn tree else you anger the Faerie folk. In the song, the woman is taking her dead baby to bury under the tree, to give her baby to the faeries. We don't know how the baby died or what has led to this decision but she is set in her ways and the baby will not have a Christian burial.”