SongWriter is a new podcast that explores the connections between written word and lyrical, shining light on how all art is a reaction to other art. Hosted by songwriter and novelist, Ben Arthur, the podcast features an author telling a story (both fiction and non-fiction involved) and then a musician creates a song inspired by the story and performs it. SongWriter features a dozen episodes with many of Arthur's literary crushes, including Roxane Gay, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Orlean, Patricia Lockwood, Missy Eaves, Gary Schteyngart, Ted Leo and Jonathan Lethem.
The fourth episode features
Dolan Morgan, who is the author of That's When The Knives Comes Down and Insignificana and is also an illustrator who has a series on The Rumpus.
Emily Hope Price, who also shared a
live video of her song, is a cellist, singer, songwriter, illustrator, and composer who can also be found playing with her band Pearl and the Beard. Dolan tells a story that is sci-fi strange (and more than a little upsetting), about a dying man who is slowly replaced by a cheerful creature who grows out of his failing body.
Check it out here!
To hear the storytellers and artists in
SongWriter is to wonder whether a perpetual-motion art machine isn't just possible, but to some extent inevitable, constituting its own universal law of creation. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum, but draws energy from the things around it and, in turn, provides momentum for subsequent works of art. "All art responds to other art," Arthur
wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed, concerning the fine line between stealing from, and being inspired by, the works of other artists. It's not news that artists take inspiration from numerous sources, even literature, and the serendipitous journey of any piece of artwork can seem profound after the fact. But Arthur takes an especially expansive view of literature as muse, and his wide-ranging forays into storytelling are - like his music - deeply resonant and heartfelt. Each art form has unique ways of captivating its audience, a "secret language to get inside people's chests," Arthur said. "My lifelong passion is to figure out how that works." Another of Arthur's projects,
SongCraft Presents, aired three half-hour episodes on PBS and garnered five Emmy Award nominations.
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