my song is your song
“We are the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the common denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.”
Make Music Day was on the 21st June and I took part in a fun global initiative called ‘my song is your song’ in which musicians from different parts of the world were paired and asked to interpret their partner’s song. I was paired with an artist from St Louis, Missouri and given her song ‘Actor’s Song’ to play with and make my own. There’s so many things I love about this! I love that connections are made between people from opposite sides of the world. I instantly felt a sense of comradery with this person that I’d only just met through a couple of emails, a joint task, and their song that I have come to know rather intimately.
I love both sides of the process - of letting go of one of your original songs and giving it to another to play with, and also of taking someone else’s song and reimagining it. I don’t know how other artists felt, but I felt something akin to being handed some eggs and being tasked with the responsibility to care and nurture them until they hatched. I wanted to honour the artist’s original expression and I also wanted to make it my own somehow.
Listening to Devon’s recording of her song in which she plays guitar, I was initially drawn to playing along on piano. Worried about it sounding too close to the original, I ended up pulling out the harp to breathe a different feel into the song. I really enjoyed mimicking Devon’s vocals, trying to feel in to her unique vocal phrasing. To my ears, there’s definitely a country flavour to her sound, but it was more than this, it was the unique nuances to her individual expression that I was trying to embody. Because of this I found myself singing with a different energy and tone than I usually would.
I feel like all artists are a mix of mirroring what they see in others but, in doing this, must also find a way to remain true to their unique palette. For me it was also a wonderful chance to pull out the much neglected harp. And I have to say that I haven’t wanted to put it down since!
