St. John’s, Newfoundland. A town of talent. The joke goes, “You can’t take a photograph in St. John’s without an artist in the background.” But this week marks a marriage of talent rare even for this town. And it happened organically …
“I was approached by The Once out of the blue, having only known them really as a fan,” Murray says. And it turns out Murray, in turn, had a fan in the band: lead singer Geraldine Hollet. She’d been reading a copy of Murray’s bestselling collection of aphorisms, Glimpse, and reached out to Murray to see if he was up for giving them a hand, lyrically, with a song they were working on.
“I of course said yes right away, and sent a poem I’d published in The New Welsh Review overseas.” A poem he suspects Canadian magazines were wary of because of its “AAAA BBBB CCCC rhyme scheme.”A scheme The Once were clearly happy to work with. They’ve even named the album after a line from Murray’s poem, Row upon Row of the People You Know.
The poem, ironically, was called “Song for Memory” long before the collaboration was bourne. And even more ominous, Murray says he’d conceived it as a song initially. It did a little globetrotting before finding itself in the band. “The first UK mag that saw it took it. Then it appeared in a prominent international poetry calendar. I sent it along [to Geraldine] because it had the word “song” in the title. Next thing I knew, Andrew Dale had sent me a recording of him in the living room playing his guitar. I nearly choked. Next there was an mp3 of the three of them singing the poem as it was written. It was haunting and beautiful, but mostly due to their talent.”
Murray’s not the only one speaking so highly of The Once. As a very minimalistic trio, they rely on the power of their voices and a fusion of traditional folk music and traditional Newfoundland music that they’ve twisted into their own trademark sound. They’ve toured Europe, and they’ve won both East Coast Music Awards and Canadian Folk Music awards. And I’ve seen more than one critic wax purple about them.
Fittingly, Murray’s poem,”Song for Memory” is about “the power of words and music to freeze time and emotions.” But words and music can only do so because of the hard work that goes into them. People argue over what is harder to write, A good novel, a good poem, or a good short story. The answer is a good song. The lyrics have to not only strike a chord with a listener, but they have to blend, syllabically, into the timing and rhythm of the song. Something Murray was quite understanding of as the collaboration played out.
“Some of the original words didn’t work in the musical structure they’d created. Phil Churchill, the nicest tough guy in St. John’s, approached me and asked about rewriting, like he thought I might get offended by the concept. I said, Hell’s Bells, it’s YOUR song. So we worked on changing the poem into the lyrics, shifting things around, changing words and concepts, etc.”
They did it over email at first, but eventually “spent a Sunday around a dining table with guitar, bouzouki and voices, trying things out and searching for just the right word. It was literally the most inspiring thing I’ve ever done. It ended a drought in my own writing. Very energizing and exciting.”
He admits to being attached to it still, in a parent-child manner. “[I'm] still in love, but no longer responsible for it. It’s a big man poem now, and out in the world doing its own thing. Has my genetics, but has become so much more than just that.” Speaking of genetics. It’s kind of a twin, this poem, as it will appear in George’s upcoming book of poems, Whiteout. I’m pretty excited for it. Some days I think he’s my favourite Canadian poet.
And without further ado, here it is “Song for Memory”
And here’s an endearing clip of the band winning over the audience in an award acceptance speech at the ECMAs.
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