Heaneyland!

Who for such MP3s would not stoop?

One of my current projects is writing music to all the poems in "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass". This all started because my friends Veronica and Susannah were organizing an afternoon of short scenes adapted from chapters of the Alice books to be performed in various community gardens in the East Village a few summers ago, and invited me to write a musical scene for it. They suggested the Gryphon/Mock Turtle scene, since that one had three potential songs in it. I was pretty happy with the result, and thought, oh, I should write music to more of these.

Then I moved, and in the course of the move, I lost the music to all three songs, and didn't discover this fact until enough time had gone by that I had mostly forgotten how to play them.

I couldn't really get up the energy to write more Alice songs after losing the first three, so the project languished. Eventually, I tracked down a copy of a video someone had made of our performance, relearned the songs, and things got moving again. So this is one of those first three songs, "Turtle Soup" (lyrics and annotation here). It features the bass stylings of Jim Wagner (possibly related to this guy), although those bass stylings are very difficult to hear on tinny computer speakers (good for Mario theme music, bad for Primus). Be sure you are fully equipped with woofers for maximum rocking.

Posted by Francis at 03:08 PM