#schooldaysover

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The Big Hewer, Part 4

The final part of this strange and beautifully shot doc/musical/film.

[schooldaysover]

many lives for a song

How did a BBC Radio2 drama give birth to a an Irish song?  Here's part two of "The Big Hewer" which is a documentary film by Philip Donnellan based on the original 1960s Radio drama of the same name.

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A place where The Clancy Brothers and Andy Stott meet

It only took a few sessions to get a sonic vocabulary going for Grant and my version of “Schooldays Over”.  One thing that came out immediately from our writing together was lots of sub-bass.  We wanted sounds that would act as foundational roots and would roll out other frequencies from the bottom up.

Grant turned me on to the amazing Andy Stott’s music,

and some of those vibes can be picked up in our recording.  Obviously what Stott does is totally different from us, but that “cave system” of sound is something we tried to achieve.

That attention to the low end of the spectrum was also inspired by this live recording of The Clancy Brothers doing “Schooldays”.  

It sounds like it was recorded in a mine.  The insistent drumbeat like a call to war, or a pick on a rock.

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When people ask me about the making of Schooldays Over—about how the project came together—I’m never sure what to say. There was no manifesto, no discussion of process or meaning or inspiration. We kept it simple. But now that it’s done, now that it’s out there, taking the time to place a frame around it seems like a good idea, a good opportunity.

And really, we’d already started before we even began because it grew organically out of the friendship between Grant and myself. I’ve known Grant for years and we were looking for an excuse to work on a project together.

I’ve always appreciated Grant’s musical vision, even though we come from different parts of the musical ecosystem here in the Twin Cities. I come from the “classical/soundart/experimental” realm and he comes to the table with a more “pop” or singer/songwriter sensibility. We wanted to see what new chemical reaction would occur when you put those two personalities together. The truth is, we didn’t know. Would it be something too strange for people who liked Grant’s other music, or would it not be experimental or crazy enough for people who are more into the type of music I usually work on? We didn’t know if the end result would be obnoxious and unpalatable or if people would take to it.

The project began in earnest—the ping-ponging back and forth of ideas—when we were at SXSW a few years ago. We were there for an innova recordings showcase with Graham Reynolds and Golden Hornet Project, Val-inc, Sxip Shirey, Prester John, Todd Reynolds and so many other creative people. Grant and I wanted to collaborate for the showcase, but we wanted it to be something a bit more than the two of us doing ambient improvisation. We needed it to be grounded, to have a lyrical and melodic anchor.

We came to “Schooldays” intuitively; we were just drawn to it. We tried to draw big highlights around the aspects that drew us in. Some of those dimensions happened to be things that hadn’t been explored before in other versions. We wanted the source material to sink into us. On some level we were hyper aware of the pieces but at a certain point you have to ingest that material and then you open up a spot where you forget.

When we decided to turn that performance into a recording, we wanted to keep that feel of multi-instrumental playing. One player doing many things, or shifting stations from keyboard to percussion to koto, etc. Things that we had put together as two people expanded out concentrically. It felt right to pare down the synthesizers and bring in players on instruments. For strings we enlisted the extremely talented Michelle Kinney and Jacqueline Ultan who are two of my favorite cellists in the Twin Cities. For percussion, we were lucky enough to have Joey Van Phillips agree to play. All these players brought their own angle to the sound, filling it out into something fuller.

As we worked, it became clear that the heart of the tune was more about psychological exploration, almost a diorama or snowglobe to look inside. In a way, all the other versions we listened to along the way worked their way in there, from Luke Kelly’s bouncy, matter-of-fact treatment to Mary Black’s more melancholy, lost pastoral version.

Ultimately we wanted to craft a landscape that the listener could enter into to. We extended certain parts, elongated certain feelings and then always brought it back to the anchor of the words. Out there in this big landscape are these islands, these places that move the narrative forward, where the verses rise up, what we call “Song 1” and “Song 2.”