Eagle Child Twice Born started as a poem. I had wanted to do a purely spoken word piece for a while however this wasn’t quite how I had expected it to come about.
In the Sunday Songwriter’s group that I regularly wax lyrical about during deepest, darkest lockdown we were running at two tasks a week set by someone within the group and ECTB started life there.
Week 9 one of the tasks was set by Lorna Reid. We were to use a random word generator on our phone and write from there after a 3-minute brain dump. I got the word ‘bacchanalian’.
Some days in I was getting nowhere. Then I remembered that I had recently been dipping into Stephen Fry’s ‘Mythos’ (I’m sure there’s an ooh er missus there somewhere … ) and so I went back to see what he had to say about Bacchus. Well, quite a bit as it turns out and from the story of his birth and life I was able to construct a poem that became EGTB fairly quickly.
There was meter but no musical structure. I could have written a ‘through piece’. As it turns out I didn’t need to. We were having weekly feedback sessions at that point on a Saturday evening (the Sunday refers to when the task(s) were set! At the sessions one of the other members, Jen Athan, suggested that she could hear an chromatic orchestral piece and suggested some sources of inspiration, as I had no idea really what she meant! She then just casually threw into the conversation that she might like to write it.
I didn’t need asking twice. Jen is a supremely talented young songwriter, performer and producer and her work is stunning. Over the next week or so I followed it up and within a very short space of time she can written, performed and produced it and bounced it back. It was perfect to me. It underpinned the mood of the words and supported the piece without overwhelming it. See what you think. Out now on Bandcamp. I am very proud of it and other than my work with Doc Satori it was the first collaboration in years and took place in a very different space and world.
Hear it now at https://noprimadonnas.bandcamp.com/
A word of two about Jen. She is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Glasgow currently. She has written music for theatre shows and short films and enjoys creating music to accompany a narrative. (Handily for me). She studied Commercial Music at university and graduated from with a First-Class Honours Degree in the summer of 2018. She has worked with the Scottish Youth Theatre and she has scored and recorded music for the short film Cinderella by Lotte Reiniger and released her own music. She has won the Music for Film and Sound Aesthetic award. She is also currently involved in Scottish Women Inventing Music group and a brand new project called FASE with singer / songwriter / producer Rosie Bans. Her current single and EP is ‘I Love Me, I Love Me Not’ available on Bandcamp.
https://jenathan.bandcamp.com/album/i-love-me-i-love-me-not
