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 Michael Brook » Works » Solo » RockPaperScissors
Related Links: » Video - The making of RockPaperScissors. » Interview: Michael Brook talks about RockPaperScissors on NPR
RockPaperScissors
is Michael Brook’s new album, his third solo offering. When not recording in his Lavanderia
studio located in the Hollywood Hills, Michael and his co-producer,
multi-instrumentalist and arranger Rich Evans (of Peter Gabriel's band)
traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria on behalf of this ambitious project, where they
recorded local orchestral and choral ensembles. Into this mix, Brook introduced
several vocalist/songwriters such as his former 4AD label mate Lisa Germano, Shira Myrow and Paul Buchanan from the
Blue Nile. With his record now
finished and ready for its August 2006 release, Michael offers some reflections
on the unique set of events and working methods that yielded each track
comprising RockPaperScissors: Track 2 “Want” is a
collaboration with Lisa Germano and I think
she did an amazing job creating personal and strong lyrics. The scenario for
this song is where someone in a relationship has essentially decided it’s the
wrong thing. But they can’t end it as the other person is always happy and they
don't want to rain on their parade; or the person is always sad and they don't
want to kick them when they're down. Richard Evans did a great job of taking
the original chord progression played on a keyboard (which is slightly
irregular but has a very emotional quality) and orchestrating it for the
Bulgarian orchestra. The conductor of the Bulgarian orchestra was fantastic and
had a strong understanding of the feel we were going for, which was a little
more rigorous than romantic. And Lisa's vocal performance is emotionally
involving without being overwrought. Track 3 “Doges” -- There isn’t really a
story behind this piece. In general for me there is not an idea and then the
music. I tend to play randomly and improvise and then something comes out that
I like; then I record and develop it. You work on the music and each time something
there suggests what you should do next. It's an incremental process and at the
start I don’t know what the ending will be. It's making music that sounds good
to me at the time. Track 4 “DarkRoom”
has an amazing reading in it by Sir Richard Burton. I was playing the track to
Rich Evans and we thought there should be some spoken word -- something that
really appealed to me to try on this project. I randomly heard a clip of Burton
reading something from Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood”… the power and emotion
of his voice, and the abstract imagery that created with the words, suddenly
brought new life into the music. It's just a list of things but it is done with
such vigor that it creates a hard to specify but moving experience for me. The contents of the piece probably sound very weird:
Burton reading “Under Milk Wood”, our amazing Lebanese violinist, a Bulgarian
orchestra and then the sort of slightly fake rock music that I do. I think the
thing that pervades the album is an affectionate but also at times
tongue-in-cheek look at rock music, which is what I grew up listening to and
playing. But I find it too youthful in almost every way these days to hold much
interest for me. Yet it’s still what I know how to do, and it’s what comes out
most of the time. Track 5 “RockPaperScissors”
is a collaboration with Shira
Myrow, a very talented singer and songwriter whom I
saw perform, and was impressed by her lyrical ability. Then we were lucky
enough to get Paul Buchanan, the extraordinary vocalist from the Blue Nile, to
sing on the track, at Craig Armstrong’s studio in Glasgow. The idea behind this one was how it seems to
me that people always envy what other people have. The title is a sort of
metaphor for the idea that what we don't have always seems more attractive than
what we do have. I think Shira did a great job of
taking the intellectual concept and putting it into a flowing, song-like
structure. It was interesting for me as I tried to edit and add my own lyrical
contributions and found that they seemed flat, pedantic, and intellectual. But
her words convey the ideas and the spirit behind the concept of the song but do
it in an artful way. The music is in a small way an homage
to Timbaland, the producer who does a lot of Missy
Elliot's stuff, with a bit of a hip hop drum beat. Track 6 “Tangerine” was one of the few pieces that was different in the way it was created. In some ways I'm
from the 52 pick-up school of
composition where I create a bunch of little snippets of ideas and then I try
to compose by editing. But this one actually started as just a guitar arpeggio.
And then the slide guitar, which initially was the prime melodic force, is just
a real time performance. Claude Chalhoub doubled what the guitar was doing, and in mixing
it I have one or the other or both included it to give light and dark shades.
This piece is actually like what real musicians do. It's like a performance and
I like the simplicity. Track 7 “LightStar,” which I think has
turned into a real winner, definitely had a troubled history. It always felt
kind of generic to me and I felt uncomfortable with it. I was going to throw it
out. But then we asked the traditional Bulgarian choir we were working with to
sing over the music. It is was beautiful and moving, but the second part of
their contribution didn't work with the backing track. So good old Rich Evans
got a friend of his to transcribe what the traditional song did, and
orchestrate it, and he slipped it into a recording session he was doing in
Hungary. So this song has a rock band, a traditional Bulgarian choir, a
classical Bulgarian orchestra for the first half, and then a classical
Hungarian orchestra for the second half. And then I thought it would be nice to
take it to a sort of dream sequence thing where it drifts in at the end to the
choir sounding like they are coming off an old ‘78’ being broadcast over the
short wave. I really like this piece, it's a journey. What I enjoy about a lot
of this music is that often it doesn’t use repetitive structure. Track 8 “Pond” -- This has a long and complicated history. It
started out as a just kind of white noise drone with a little dissonant melody
in it played on a synthesizer. Then we had an orchestra play it, which I liked,
and then added piano and percussion, and then added some outtakes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan singing,
from one of the album sessions I did with him. This song also has Djivan Gasparayan playing duduk at the end. Two incredible
musicians. Gasparayan is 73-years old now and
is considered a national treasure in Armenia. He's also always a pleasure to
work with. Track 9 “Silverized” is a kind of
transcendental cowboy song. I like the mixture of elements. There is almost a
spaghetti western Marlboro man guitar, and then an ecstatic growing organ swell
with the orchestra, and then the choir. We were looking for words to have the
choir sing and Rich suggested that they could sing just any old Latin. His
wife, who is an Egyptologist, had a book from her university days of the
writings of Lucretius and I really liked a lot of the things he said (he was a
very skeptical philosopher). It was surprising how few words you can get out
with a choir when they are singing slowly…I don’t think we made it through one
paragraph of Lucretius. I think it ended up sounding really nice and I love the
way this piece goes off on this psychedelic thing at the end. So it's
psychedelic, transcendental, country and spaghetti western music. Sort of. Tracks 10 & 11 “Pasadena Parts 1 & 2” -- It starts with a wonderful, emotional piece from London-based singer-songwriter Ben Christophers. The second part is an orchestral thing that was inspired by Arvo Part. I really think he's great. He does simple, beautiful music. Then it has Djivan Gasparyan playing duduk on the third section and at the very end there are these long sections of Claude Chalhoub’s violin. It is another journey composition which I personally like a lot. Michael
Brook April
2006
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