As well as being a lyric poet I am a lyricist with the musical project Mirabeau.
We recorded our first album Golden Key four years ago in a tiny studio in Brighton. One of my most vivid memories is of the band at the start of the sessions, waiting for the valves of a huge, old-fashioned amplifier to warm up before we could begin. We wanted the richer sound that the old analogue amps give. Although it had taken a lot of work to get us to the stage of recording, as we waited it seemed that the life of the band was only really beginning then, in that slow rise of temperature, electricity radiating in glass.
We’ve recently returned to recording, at a north London venue this time, as sadly the recession has hit hard and the Brighton sound lab we had used was a casualty. Our second album Age of Exploration has just been released. For this, the singer-songwriter Caroline Trettine and I worked with David Chapman on bass and with Roberto Sainz de la Maza on guitar. Fyfe Dangerfield, best known for his work with the band Guillemots, makes a couple of cameo appearances on the new album, on percussion on the title track and on an electronically-treated guitar on “Hunt the Rain Down”.
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Mirabeau, Golden Key(Generous, 2011) |
Mirabeau is expressly a poetry project, designed to combine poems with music, though instrumentals do appear as well. The words are usually but not exclusively mine, with the music usually composed by the singer-songwriter Caroline Trettine. We are both vocalists, with Caroline firmly on the singing end of the spectrum while I am nearer speech, though not quite (after all, Jarvis Cocker and Leonard Cohen are ‘singers’, and an inspiration).
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David Chapman, bass, relaxes between sessions, 2014. Photo: © R Price |
The kinds of poems which I provide fall into three main categories. The first kind are poems which I have written without thinking they would have any musical accompaniment. For example in Golden Key Caroline has set “In your generous hours” to music, a poem previously published in Lucky Day. As a poem it has all kinds of sonic play at a density per line which many song lyrics don’t have -- and shouldn’t have since a lyric can more usefully draw on the sonic energy of the music itself (roughly speaking). To have too much text-based activity per line risks appearing fussy, snagging the drive of the song, and creating a wordy ‘over-educated’ effect the poem on its own does not have. It is very tempting for poets to write over-egged lyrics but they should resist! – they have misunderstood how sophisticated songs are in their own way, with a different line by line quality altogether.
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Fyfe Dangerfield prepares the drum kit for “Age of Exploration”. Photo: © R Price |
Caroline’s composition for my ‘poemy’ kinds of poems is quieter than for those she writes for lyrics proper, and structurally makes the most of the spaces between stanzas or deliberate pauses in the poem. This is especially where there is a change of direction in the text – ‘the turn’ - between verses (as, for example, in the tracks “Golden Key” and in “Duchal Wood”). These recordings don’t sound like songs and aren’t intended to; they sound like poems with delicate musical backing. In a live situation – and we tend to record live all together, rather than layering tracks– the other musicians improvise around the core that Caroline and I have set. In some cases this becomes foregrounded gorgeously – as with Roberto’s treacly electric bass on Age of Exploration’s “Snow”. In that case I deliberately delayed my vocals so that the musicians would have more time to play together between verses.
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Caroline Trettine at the Age of Exploration sessions, 2014. Photo: © R Price |
The second type of poem I’ve provided for Mirabeau are those which I have written expressly to double as lyrics. As readers of my poetry collection Rays will know, I write for an imaginary band who I call The Loss Adjustors – one sequence in Rays is essentially the lyric sheet for their debut album Songs for The Loss Adjustors. On the page, they are playing a game with the reader who is being asked somehow to imagine them as tracks and yet still respond to their music-less existence, their ‘page poetry’, in a book of poems. Mirabeau’s first album and Age of Exploration draws on those lyrics, realising them very much as songs.
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Richard Price, from a solo performance Brno, Czech Republic, 2014. Reprinted with permission. |
The third kind of poem I have used with Mirabeau comes from much more conceptual territory. This only occurs once, in the longer track “Bach Sweetly” on the new record (entitled “Boxed” in my next collection with Carcanet, Moon for Sale), and was written as a text to be performed in a manner somewhere between Samuel Beckett’s monologues and the poetry of the late Leslie Scalapino. I had seen Scalapino read alongside Catherine Wagner at the Parasol Unit off the City Road, East London, and was interested in how they both produced unusual sonic effects in their poetry (Wagner incorporated snippets of singing into her performance, a practice I have adopted at times, too). Here, Caroline used a different approach to setting the piece, picking up on the reference to musical instruments in the text – the piano and the cello. Using treated, synthesised versions of these instruments on a keyboard she then produced a mesmeric loop of them. The text, which has a permutational and looping form of its own, becomes more and more urgent while the music powers steadily and I think mesmerically on… until a shock ending.
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Roberto Sainz de la Maza, Age of Exploration sessions, 2014. Photo: © R Price |
Perhaps there is a fourth category of poems: translations (though, strictly speaking, these are the ‘page poems’ I have described earlier). Mirabeau takes its name from the Pont Mirabeau of Guillaume Apollinaire’s famous poem. Another element of what Mirabeau do is to set translated poetry to music – Caroline’s own translation of “Le Pont Mirabeau” appears on Age of Exploration, alongside my translation of a poem by the French sonneteer Louise Labé (previously collected in Rays) and even my ‘translation’ – into modern English – of Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” (also in Rays).
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Mirabeau, Age of Exploration (Generous, 2015) |
Translation is always a multi-layered form of exploration, and I feel is yet another form of sensual, emotional travel that our new album is attempting to share with its listeners, new lyric landscapes, we hope, of poetry and song.
Richard Price’s poetry includes Lucky Day, Greenfields, Rays, and Small World (Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2013). His collection of essays on modern lyric poetry, Is this a Poem?, will be published by Molecular Press in 2016. He is Head of Contemporary British Collections at the British Library.
Golden Key and Age of Exploration are available in CD and download via amazon, CDBaby, and iTunes.
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