Songbird: a sad-happy tale
Here's a new video for one of our earlier songs: three minutes of high-flying harmonies, and a sweet tale of redemption. Plus thoughts on music and images, and a rough guide to making weird videos.
For anyone new here, Songwritings is a conversation between Kate van der Borgh (writer, D&AD Masterclass trainer, musician, first novel ‘And He Shall Appear’ out with Fourth Estate this autumn) and Nick Asbury (writer, poet, Perpetual Disappointments Diarist, purpose critic, with a side interest in Tin-Pan-Alley-tinged songwriting). The conversation features original songs, usually written by Nick, then reinterpreted and brought to life with Kate on all instruments and vocals.
NICK
This is one of the first songs we released, way back in the mists of 2022. Lyrics and melody by yours truly, arrangement and vocals by Kate. And what vocals they are—I love how the song does so much with nothing more than bass, finger clicks and a few singing Kates.
The video is new and an excuse to share the song again. It’s edited from a public domain cartoon called The Song of the Birds (Max Fleischer, 1935). I’ll explain later my five-step process for piecing these things together.
Somewhere along the line, video has become a pretty big part of this project. When you’re sharing songs online, it helps to give people something to do with their eyes. So at some point I went off in search of copyright-free footage, which led to a natural overlap with the Tin Pan Alley era, because so much film from that time is now in the public domain. You can see our growing collection on YouTube.
I’m no great cinephile and certainly no expert editor, but it’s uncanny how you can find a video, splice out a couple of scenes, and discover it fits spookily well with the themes and shape of a song you wrote 80+ years later. And it gets me thinking about the whole relationship between words and images. It’s nice to listen to music in its pure audio form and see what it conjures up. But it’s also nice to gaze at album artwork (something we do less these days), or watch a video that enriches the music in some way (something we do more these days). Any thoughts on all that?
KATE
Yes, the link between music and images is a big topic, isn’t it? Like you say, cover art can change the way we think about an album. And, separately, music can describe scenes from real or imagined worlds quite ‘literally’—which is what’s beginning to happen with our videos.
Back when I was a child-bassoonist, our county band played the fourth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique—and our conductor explained that the music describes a man dreaming of being walked to the guillotine (in the version above, he imagines his beloved in the crowd at 4:21, just before the blade falls, the head rolls and the crowd begins to cheer).
There’s also Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, which uses an unusual 5/8 time signature to evoke the rowing of the oarsman who is carrying you across the water to the afterlife (you can hear it from the off and throughout, but my fave moment in this version is probably the big dramatic one at 8:46).
I think this kind of ‘painting’ with music can be a helpful ‘way in’ for people who struggle with classical music. There must be lots of us whose introduction to this music was hearing Peter and the Wolf or Carnival of the Animals, either on telly or at school. And, of course, it isn’t only relevant to the classical world—even before I saw the video, I could never hear Knights of Cydonia without hearing a literal galloping cavalry at 0:49.
Of course, you might say that music’s superpower is in not having to be literal at all! But then, we’re talking about songs, with text, which potentially brings a degree of ‘concreteness’ to the music anyway.
I’m going to bounce the question back at you, and perhaps you can bring us back to songs and band art. What do you think about music and images in general?
NICK
Yes, this is actually a chance to share a recently-launched Kickstarter involving some friends of ours. Designer/musician Jamie Ellul and writer Jim Davies are putting together this lovely book of band logos and the stories behind them. Contributors include our mutual writer friends Tim Rich and Fiona Thompson, as well as your brother and esteemed designer of the Songwritings logo Matt Baxter.
You can definitely see how the choice of band name and accompanying logo shapes your impression of the music. And that extends into the cover artwork—I know many people first got into graphic design by spending hours gazing at Vaughan Oliver or Peter Saville covers. Being a writer, I specifically remember poring over the text and small print of album covers: reading the names of the band members, or the studio where it was recorded, or the songwriting credits. All vital, nerdy information that could send you off in other directions.
I guess what music and images share in common is that they’re non-verbal and non-literal (at least with purely instrumental music). And because they call on different senses, they can fit together really beautifully, especially in videos. ‘Hurt’ feels like an even better song when you see the Johnny Cash video. Or you can do something more jarring, like setting Vietnam footage to What a wonderful world.
KATE
God, that scene from Good Morning, Vietnam. The friction between the music and images really does burn.
I’m so glad you mentioned Logo Rhythm! I’ve pledged for my copy, plus pin badges because I’m treating myself. I don’t know if I’ve ever met a graphic designer who isn’t a massive music nerd (a compliment, folks) so this book is bound to be a banger.
Just in case Jamie and Jim don’t have space for it, perhaps we should mention the infamous Party Cannon logo. According to bassist Chris Ryan, the logo not only bagged the band some new listeners but is also being taught on art and marketing courses in UK universities. For full disclosure, it seems the poster above was altered, with the colours added for comic effect—but these are the real logo colours, and even in monochrome it looks nothing like anything else in the death metal arena… I smile every time I see it.
Going back to music videos, there are also those that exist as artworks in themselves. I remember loving the video for Just by Radiohead because it’s like a short story. It’s the kind of thing you could set to all kinds of tracks (in fact, my memory used to trick me by pairing it with Street Spirit), and yet the music and the video seem perfectly matched—they both describe the alienation and impotence it’s possible to feel in modern life, but in totally different ways. Maybe it’s a bit like a writer who adapts a book for film—they try to preserve the heart of the work but in a new format.
Can you tell us a bit about how you approach the videos for Songwritings?
NICK
Yes, that Radiohead one is really good—I remember seeing it years ago, but (like you) I’m not sure I could have told you which track it was.
So here is my proprietary five-step process for making the videos:
1. Go to archive.org—a great collection of films that have come into the public domain.
2. Enter related search terms (romance, songbird, business, dreaming, etc). Filter for pre-1940.
3. Eventually find something that feels so uncannily right, it’s as though it’s been sent by a kindly ghost from 100 years back.
4. Download the mp4 and drag it into iMovie (which I’d barely used before this).
5. Splice out bits, rearrange bits, occasionally adjust the speed of bits, to get it working with the music. Be amazed at how quickly it all comes together.
So far, this has worked for:
Been Dreaming About You Lately, where I didn’t have to do any splicing—just picked an appropriate 3 minutes of the film. And I no doubt found ‘Dream of a Rarebit Fiend’ by searching for ‘dreaming’.
I delight in you, where I searched for city and work-themed stuff and eventually found Metropolis. This needed the most splicing and rearranging—I felt more like a proper film auteur.
I wanted you to know—probably the spookiest one, where I searched for ‘romance’, found Romance Sentimentale, and discovered a section worked perfectly for the song lyric (with another more abstract section for the bridge). Lonely singer stares mutely out of window, then plays the piano to express herself. Thank you Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein.
And now Songbird, where I actually did a whole other video to start with, but it was a bit of a stretch thematically and tonally (based on a film called It’s A Bird). Then I found The Song of the Birds (Max Fleischer, 1935) and—again, with minimal editing—a section of it fitted perfectly with the shape of the song.
KATE
For me, it’s a reminder that so much of the creative process is about serendipity—trying stuff out, seeing whether ideas fit together. I only managed to write a novel by writing the wrong things loads and loads (and loads) of times. You wouldn’t believe how many scenes and characters and plot points ended up in the bin—and how many times two completely unplanned things clicked conveniently into place.
It's not that I don’t believe in inspiration. It definitely happens, of course. But maybe it happens because you’ve spent ages striking (potentially crappy) ideas against one another, like bits of flint, and they’ve generated the spark of something good.
NICK
Yes, I bet that process of splicing and rejigging videos has a lot of parallels with writing a novel. Serendipity is a lovely word for the process. Google tells me it comes from Horace Walpole’s The Three Princes of Serendip, a fairy tale in which the heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Which plays into my hobby horse about creativity not being a purpose-driven process, but almost the opposite.
I guess there’s a reason why some of this serendipity happens: there’s that idea of the seven basic plots and stories having a similar shape over time. So The Song of the Birds begins darkly, then reaches a turning point, then switches into a happy new day. And the song follows the same structure.
And I like how the story isn’t a perfect fit—the song is about thwarted romance, whereas the film is about a destructive boy learning a lesson. But there are lots of thematic echoes at the right moments. ‘You were wrong, bird, to be so carefree’ as the bird falls from the sky. ‘This morning, I’m mourning my loss’ as the bird is carried to its grave 😢 ‘Cut to tomorrow’ as the sun is about to rise 😊
With all of them, I like this sense of repurposing older material, from the same era that inspires the songs. I’ve started thinking of this whole project as a conversation conducted across the years, from one time period to another (as in the title of our first song From time to time). There’s a 1920s feel to some of the music, but it’s also its own, more contemporary thing—especially in recent tracks like I delight in you. It’s nice to feel we’re exploring somewhere old but also going somewhere new.
KATE
Ha! ‘Accidents and sagacity’ should be the new Songwritings brand values. Most of our posts (and songs, to be fair) start with us throwing ideas hopefully into the air and seeing how they land. Which seems like a good place to wrap up this post, another happy accident…
Thanks everyone for reading, listening and watching. Kate and I had an earlier conversation about Songbird here, talking about the power of sad lyrics with happy tunes (or vice versa). In a subsequent post, we got onto things like the etymological links between breath and spirit/life, and the contrasting links between worry and strangling or the loss of breath. That post is called Don’t give us your worries, give us a song. We’ll be back with a new song soon.