One of the great joys of being professional musicians is that we are constantly meeting other artists whose work we love, whether it’s at music industry conferences, festivals, or a fortuitous double-bill. These meetings often lead to the “we should get together and collaborate on something!” conversation, but coordinating schedules and logistics between touring artists/groups presents a big challenge.
But sometimes we get lucky.
Zoe Mulford describes herself as a “transatlantic singer-songwriter” who splits her time between the US and the UK. She is perhaps best known these days for her song The President Sang Amazing Grace, which tells the story of the mass shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC in 2015, where a white gunman attacked the congregation, killing nine people. Joan Baez heard Zoe’s song playing on the radio and eventually recorded a cover of it on her 2018 album Whistle Down the Wind.
In Windborne, we’ve been admiring Zoe for many years, since both Nowell Sing We Clear and Lynn and Will covered her piece Welcome In Another Year, and we were especially excited to see that we would cross paths with her at the New England Regional Folk Alliance (NERFA) conference in 2018. We’ve been having the “we should collaborate!” conversation with her since that meeting, and this year, good fortune and good planning finally made it all come together.
We set aside a few days in March at the end of our UK tour to spend at Zoe’s house in Manchester, UK to work on a new piece she’d written, Songs Stay Sung. She sent us her melody and throughout our tour, we used spare moments to record ideas for harmonies on our phones, but the real magic happened (as is often the case) when we could all actually sit down together. In just two days, we went from a few rough ideas to a finished arrangement (which is lightning-fast in Windborne time!), so we zipped over to the studio and laid down the track. It was a little stressful to go from nothing to the recording studio in 48 hours, but we are so glad that we pushed ourselves to do so, especially given that with the pandemic, it’s uncertain when we would be able to convene with Zoe in person again.
We’re still working on a final audio version, but we wanted to share this draft track with you now–you will be the first people in the world to hear this song! (For those of you at the Windborne Friend ($12) level and up: we don’t have a High Quality version of the track yet, but we will add it to the collection when it’s available! Don’t forget that all our High-Quality Downloads are catalogued here so you can find them easily.)
We also wanted to pass along a few words from Zoe herself about the song:
Over the last several years, a number of people around me have suffered losses – loss of parents, children, spouses, friends – and I struggled to find words. There are many beautiful ways to express condolence, but there was an idea I kept reaching for that doesn’t show up in any of the standard phrases. I tried to write it down, and this lyric is what happened.
I wrote tune after tune for it without finding one that fit right. The lyric is hymn-like, but I wanted the song to feel more open and less square. When I heard Windborne at NERFA in 2018, I realized that what I needed was polyphony – something like a cross between a madrigal and a shape-note hymn. I was pretty sure that these four smart and eclectic vocalists could help me find the sound I wanted.
We met up at my home in Manchester while they were on tour this year in the UK. We worked out the arrangement and recorded the track in two days at the beginning of March.
They went home to the US just before the Coronavirus hit Europe. By the end of the month, all of us were in lockdown.
I had no idea when I wrote the song how much grief would be going around by the time the recording was released. Even the best words are never enough, but this is what I’ve got.
The notions in the last verse are respectfully swiped from a passage from Lucretius (De Rerum Natura) that my father has framed on his wall. After my mother died, he found several pieces of poetry copied out among the papers on her desk. We don’t know why she copied them out, but they were strangely comforting.
(Track art by Zoe)
Songs Stay Sung
by Zoe Mulford featuring Windborne
There is an end to every thing –
the breath we take and the songs we sing
and the last note rings and dies away
but the song stays sung ’til the end of days
And all we do may be undone
but love stays loved and songs stay sung
Love stays loved and songs stay sung
And astronomers could never chart
the constellations of the heart
For lovers part and lovers pine
but the love stays loved ’til the end of time
(chorus)
And every life is a brief, bright spark
that dies and seems to leave no mark
So we curse the dark and we mourn the flame
(chorus)
And I’ve been told that we are made
of dust cast off when stars decayed
and the bodies fade that once were ours
but the dust goes on to make new stars
(chorus)
