September 2020 - Idiom

In September 2020 I did a music appreciation and songwriting course facilitated by the great Nano Stern. It was a fantastic opportunity to hear his reflections on the music that has shaped him and to be guided through different approaches to songwriting. At the outset of the course (which ran once per week over a month), he challenged us to start writing a song which would hopefully be shared with the group in an end-of-course celebration.

A day or two before the course began I had started messing around with some bi-lingual lyrics - I was trying to figure out whether I could make something coherent that switched between English and Spanish, which soon evolved into an exercise in trying to connect each interchange with a phonetic link that sustained the meaning in both languages. I didn't start with the intention of, in turn, making the lyrics a reflection on language itself - that kind of evolved as I racked my brain for these phonetic bridges.

I read the lyrics (which were very freshly baked) to Nano when he called on me during one of the sessions (I'm so glad he did, although I was somewhat terrified that he would). His English is very good and he got the gist of what I was doing straight away - he encouraged me and counselled me to keep the musical accompaniment very simple so as to not get in the way of what are very dense lyrics to digest. Listening in was a bi-lingual poet, who was presenting a part of the course at Nano's invitation, and he reached out to me directly to congratulate me on the concept and execution of the lyrics.

With more than enough encouragement, I knuckled down to create some music - the end result was pretty simple and left lots of open aural space to allow the listener to hear the hand offs between languages. Because the song is about the loss of language, the instrumental bookends transition between a full melodic palette and a sparse and disappearing melody, echoing the disappearance of languages in the intro and emphasising the rescue and resuscitation of languages in the outro.

You can watch the initial exchange with Nano and the debut of the song in the end-of-course celebration here.

Language is life, vital,

it’s not either/or, neither-

No seamos descuidados,

sin lengua somos mu-

Doors close, light fades,

bells fall silent, everything is qui-

Etnias perdidas,

sus canciones desapare-

See-there’s life force in those nouns,

verbs, adjectives that’s slip-

Pinturas de una historia

no vista si errá-

Mausoleums to be built

for memories we’ve for-

Si-hay-quien pueda retroceder

esta destruc-

See-on this day we declare enough,

we must say no

Morir no es opción,

pelearemos por cada pala-

Brass tacks is what we’re defending,

you’ll thank me when it’s

Dan mucho y piden muy poco,

tu atención no

Mas, no more, no mas, no more,

no mas, no more, no mas