“Black Dog’s Retreat,” the photograph Robbins and Walla used for inspiration. Photo by Tom Chambers.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what sort of song might it conjure? That’s the question behind the Emmy-nominated NPR program, Project Song, a weekly art experiment that seeks to merge the crafts of photography and music-making.
Produced by All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen, Project Song invites musicians into the NPR studio to create music inspired by a collection of photos. They can pick from five photos and five words, and are then given no more than two days to come up with a song.
In the most recent episode, Chris Walla (of Death Cab for Cutie) and J. Robbins (of Jawbox and Burning Airlines) were featured, along with a collection of work from acclaimed photographer Tom Chambers. For the challenge, Walla and Robbins chose “Black Dog’s Retreat” (above) and the word “cerebral.” The musicians then went to work discussing the imagery and connotations within the photo, and then playing with sounds inspired by the discussion.
The majority of Chambers work revolves around the creation of photomontages, images that, according to Chambers himself, “illustrate the fleeting moods that can’t be captured by a traditional camera or seen by the naked eye.” “Black Dog’s Retreat” is a surreal example of how Chambers merges backgrounds, foregrounds and subjects from different pictures to create something completely new.
So it was the songwriters task to pick up on this. Within the photograph they found deep themes of desperation and the surreal, and it was with these feelings in mind that they attempted to create a song in the same spirit. The result, dubbed “Mercury,” is a fantastic compostion that manages to capture the photograph’s sense of absurdity and immediacy, or as Boilen puts it, “a song that finds hope in its despair. A bit cerebral, but full of imagination.”
In the end, Project Song offers a candid view of how some of our greatest artists see each other. It also gives an example of the fluidity of art, and how the mind of an artist can transform anything into an original creation.
To hear the song and see the full creation process for “Mercury,” check out the Project Song website.