A new poetry anthology takes the words out of the songs, writes Larry Schwartz.
REBECCA Barnard’s mother had some misgivings. “It’s lovely darling but it’s very repetitive,” Barnard says of her mum’s response to her last album. For the singer-songwriter, this was the point. “I just wanted to simplify everything, from the recording to the actual booklet.”
She’d previously included lyrics in album sleeves but decided they had no place on the uncluttered Everlasting. She wondered what readers might make of the inclusion of some the album’s songs in a literary magazine.
“At first I thought they might look a bit simple and not get what I intended to get across because they don’t have the music and they don’t have the melody,” says Barnard, who will perform at a concert to launch the latest issue of The Paradise Anthology on February 5. “When I first read them, I thought, ‘This is a bit stark.”‘
The magazine features the lyrics of musicians including Steve Kilbey, Kerri Simpson, Greg Arnold, Sarah Carroll, Charles Jenkins and Marcel Borrack.
Chris Wilson, whose Skin That You Once Wore is on the back cover, is among several who will perform on subsequent Sundays at the Butterfly Club, in South Melbourne.
“For me, the lyrics in the magazine stand as poems in their own right,” says its co-editor, Michael Crane, a poet who has organised poetry slams and other events and says he might devote future issues to lyrics and articles on songwriting.
Barnard starts out strumming and singing. “It varies but usually it’s the music first, for me,” she says.
Barnard recalls the death of her father, jazz drummer Len Barnard, in the title track, one of her three in the magazine. “I was with him when he died,” she says. “It was just him and I in the Prince Alfred, in Sydney. I was allowed to stay with him for six hours and I actually got into bed with him and just lay with him with nurses coming and going and taking out false teeth and stuff like that and then they said, ‘You’ve got to go. We’ve got to deal with what happens to a dead body.’ That was it …”
When we meet at a Fitzroy restaurant, Barnard’s 16-year-old son, Harry, a drummer in a seven-piece band is with her. He’s keen to hear more of his grandfather’s music.
“Sometimes I do a jazzy thing on the cymbals and stuff like that,” says Harry, who has the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts’ face emblazoned on his T-shirt. “I actually want to hear some of [my] mum’s dad’s music. I would like to learn from that.”
“It’s bloody loud but it’s beautiful,” Barnard, who once fronted Rebecca’s Empire, says of her son’s drumming. “He even looks like dad [when he] puts his head at a certain angle.” Mother and son are close. “It’s a mother’s job to worry/and I do it all the time,” Barnard once sang of her ailing child — Harry was in hospital for six weeks after birth. An MRI revealed he had a stroke and nearly died when she was pregnant with him. She wrote Fall and Walk — also in the magazine — about the struggle to keep going after separating from Harry’s father, guitarist Shane O’Mara.
Barnard took the title of the third lyric, Born in a Shirt, from a Russian expression for being born lucky she learned from a student at a songwriting workshop she runs at Footscray Community Arts Centre.
“Don’t censor yourself,” she tells participants. “Just write, write, write.”
The Age, 20-Jan-2012
Larry Schwartz Writer 