INTERVIEW: Birdsong at Morning search for ‘Signs and Wonders’
Photo: Members of Birdsong at Morning include, from left, Greg Porter, Darleen Wilson and Alan Williams. Photo courtesy of Coleman Rogers / Provided by 37-Media with permission.
Birdsong at Morning, the band fronted by singer-songwriter Alan Williams, know what it takes to pull off a team effort. Point in case: the band’s new album, Signs and Wonders, which employs the help of … wait for it … a 20-piece orchestra.
The project has kept Williams and his bandmates, bassist Greg Porter and guitarist Darleen Wilson, quite busy for some time. Add to that the video content for the record, and Williams was working almost nonstop for two-and-a-half years.
“Because of the video content for the record, we needed to get the [songs] to near form of completion almost a year before we could release it because we needed to make all the videos,” Williams said in a recent phone interview. “It’s two-and-a-half years in the making I guess.”
To pull off a project as expansive as this album, Williams needed to be an expert in organizational planning. He had to call in favors and rely on the help of friends.
“Over the course of Birdsong, we worked with so many really good musicians that there’s a bit of a network and a family, so in terms of the 20-piece string section, there are people that I now have on my Rolodex that I can at least send an initial email out to say if folks might be interested in doing it and then getting recommendations if they’re not able to,” he said. “So it’s not like I have to track down 20 people that I don’t know every time out, and that helps. But, yeah, finding ways to do calendars so that everyone is available — you’ve got to really plan far, far, far ahead.”
Here’s how the recording of one song went: On Signs and Wonders, there’s a cover of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.” They decided to record the tune in a completely different manner.
“The second half of the performance is all instrumental, and it’s based very much on the string arrangement,” Williams said. “But when we recorded it, we didn’t have the strings, so I have to tell the rest of the band, ‘OK, we’re going to leave about a minute and a half of space with just a little pulse going here, and then the drums need to come in here.’ You have to plan that out, anticipating what you know you’ll put in later. And that’s sort of a process that we’ve learned over the course of several previous records.”
Working with Porter and Wilson seem to be a highlight of the entire Birdsong experience for Williams. Their first album was a four-disc set called Annals of My Glass House, released back in 2011, and they pull their band name from a 19th-century Robert Louis Stevenson poem.
“Greg is my oldest friend in the world,” he said. “I think I met him when we were 15. That’s 40 years ago, and so … we’ve played music in so many contexts. I just very intuitively know what Greg will bring to the table. Even if I don’t know exactly what he will play, I know I can trust that it will be great. Darleen and I are partners, and we’ve been together for over 20 odd years. I’ve worked with Darleen both in terms of being in the band together, but also she is an accomplished recording engineer and producer. And I did some co-productions of other people’s records with her, so we have developed a way of working particularly in the studio and in terms of pre-production. So she’s very helpful with my songs when I’m in the formative stages.”
Once Williams writes a song, he will run it by Wilson and receive her impression of the tune. There might be some changes suggested, perhaps a lyric tweaked or some modification to the structure with the piece.
“I’ll do all the heavy lifting, and I’ll pay for everything,” he said of the band’s agreement. “They are members of the band, and they contribute their creative ideas. They don’t demand anything from it, and at the same time, I’m not obligating them to devote as much time as I would put into it. So it’s a pretty good balance.”
Signs and Wonders has an interesting connection to Lowell, Massachusetts, which is home for Williams. For starters, the city is clearly displayed in videos of the various songs. However, the Lowell roots run even deeper than the visuals.
“I’ve been teaching here at the university for 20-plus years but always lived outside, out in horse country, farm country and would drive into Lowell to the job,” Williams said. “But about four years ago, [I] moved into downtown Lowell, so all the songs from this album were written while I lived in Lowell. We live in a rebuilt mill building. There’s lots of those in Lowell, and right in front of that building is a little city park where they do summer concerts. … One of those events was going on, and I had the window open. You could check out the music, and it was really inspiring. Wow, that band sounded great. I hadn’t really played my guitar in months, but something prompted me. So I reached over, and grabbed the guitar, and then closed the windows so that their music wasn’t bothering me. I wrote two songs that night.”
He added: “It’s not really directly inspired by Lowell, but at the same time, there’s a certain setup and an energy that does inform the creative part of that. There’s probably more influence of the Lowell experience than I’m aware of.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Birdsong at Morning’s new album is called Signs and Wonders. Click here for more information.
