SOUNDTRACK: MOBY-One Song, Two Days, Three Versions (Project Song: May 4, 2010).
Project Song was a nifty little show that NPR Music created. The premise was that NPR would give a musician some prompts and a recording studio. They then had two days to write and record a song. I don’t know how much of the process was to be filmed, but presumably most of it. Then it would be edited down to a fifteen minute show. The results are pretty cool and it’s a shame they only made five of them.
The fifth and (presumably) final one they did was about six months after the previous one. This Project was offered to Moby.
Moby generally works alone in his New York apartment, but for Project Song, we asked him to bring along a collaborator. He picked Kelli Scarr, a Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter with a breathtaking voice. They arrived at NPR, a bit nervous and eager.
It takes weeks, even years, to write a song. NPR Music’s Project Song challenges musicians to do it in just two days. And every Project Song participant has worked right up to the last-minute — that is, until Moby.
He and collaborator Kelli Scarr finished their song in a little more than a single day. In fact, they had so much time left over, they recorded a second version of the song. And after that, they gave a small concert for the staff at NPR.
I kicked off the songwriting process by showing them a series of photographs and words. The surreal images came from New York artist Phil Toledano; you can see more of his work at NPR’s Picture Show blog. Moby and Scarr are both drawn to an image of a man in the woods wearing a trenchcoat. [Moby: “A disconcerting loneliness that I really like”]. There’s a brown briefcase on the earthen floor beside him, and his head looks like a glowing storm cloud.
Next, I gave them a series of words to choose from. Moby picked the word “flight.” Scarr chose “Sunday,” which Moby calls “the most depressing day of the week.”
Not too long after, Moby puts the card with the word “Sunday” printed on it, along with the photograph, on a nearby chair. He picks up a bass guitar and immediately starts playing a riff in the key of E. Turns out, this hastily played bass line would become the bedrock for their new song.
Just six hours later, the first of three versions of “Gone to Sleep” was recorded.
When he arrives he says he thought about cheating with chords ahead of time, but he likes the idea of jumping headlong into a project. And as the blurb says, within minutes he’s got a bass line, some synths and drums. Then a guitar line and more keyboard sounds.
Then they work on lyrics. Moby says, “My favorite type of unsettling art is art that isn’t immediately unsettling.” he cites the classic example of “Mack the Knife.” You first hear it and it’s happy and then you listen to the lyrics and its terrifying.
The end of the video clip plays the whole song, guitar and piano and atmospheric. Then over the closing credits they play a somewhat less atmospheric, gentler version of the song. And then there’s the Tiny Desk which is altogether different.
It’s like Moby broke Project Song by making it seem too easy.
[READ: July 27, 2017] “Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224)”
I’ve read a few things by Vladez Quade, but this one is quite different from anything else. It’s actually quite different form anything else I’ve read, period. The closest author this reminded me of would be Brendan Connell, who likes to thoroughly investigate a historical character (real or imagined).
But this story is based on an actual; person:
St. Christina the Astonishing has been recognized as a saint since the 12th century. She was placed in the calendar of the saints by at least two bishops of the Catholic Church in two different centuries (17th & 19th) that also recognized her life in a religious order and preservation of her relics.
The story tells of her life from the point of view of her older sister and is written in a rather formal, almost canonical, style with section headings in an old style: “How She was Led Forth from the Body and How She Lived Again.”
The narrator, Mara, tells us that Christina lay dead in her coffin, a grave awaiting her. Mara is sad, she loved Christina, “I see this now. She was difficult, unknowable but I loved her.”
But at the same time she says that perhaps if they had hastened, outrun the melody. If we’d only got those last words out, “He might have spared us our miracle.”
For indeed, the dead Christina not only rose bodily from her coffin, she levitated to the rafters. The narrator and her sister Gertrude clutched each other in fear. (more…)
