It was John Dowland who, while not even living in England, published his First Book of Songs or Ayres, and with it helped to fuel a musical craze in Elizabethan society. Over the coming decades, publications of lute-songs in English would even outstrip those of English madrigals. Dowland's First Book went through five editions by 1613; proper recognition in the form of a Court position still eluded the composer, however. So his preface to the 1612 A Pilgrimes Solace, his fourth and truly last volume of lute ayres, betrays some bitterness. Though he was not tremendously old at the time, some of the songs in this volume, such as Go, nightly cares, may themselves embody Dowland's own world-weariness.

The text of Go, nightly cares, couches its grief in conventional language; the poet expresses the usual sadness and resignation of the bereaved lover. Yet Dowland's setting contains some highly unusual features. The song begins as so many of his do, with a solo voice singing a shapely melody to the accompaniment of voices or lute and viol. Yet not only does he begin in a mournful key, the very first leap of the melody is an awkward, imperfect, and painful melodic seventh. The singer is asking (without much hope, it seems) for the nightly cares that have so long lain upon his breast to depart. Yet the refrain makes clear that the singer expects relief only in death. After a—for Dowland—very surprising shift to triple meter, the singer begins the refrain intoning "O give me time..." all on one low note, only leaving the striking monotone as the first explicit mention of death appears. A lively and syncopated concluding passage welcomes death as opposed to the "hell" of life; it then leads to the final "farewell," marked by an agonizing E flat approach. Dowland's art produces a chillingly effective reading of his sad text.

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