In tracks like Song of the Song, it was Gaiman who had to adjust his own reading rhythms to match the music. "It felt like a perfect metaphor for the shape of a life you are always traveling this Möbius strip." And that's the kind of thing that I love being able to do with them," Gaiman says. "That Möbius strip idea just took me back to the point where now I'm a grandfather and I have grandkids. And the song Möbius Strip features Gaiman providing instructions for creating a listener's own version. One of those "signs" was a Möbius strip.Īs a child, Gaiman learned to create this nonorientable band from his grandfather. Originally, Gaiman and FourPlay explored crafting works around a celestial zodiac theme, but with traditional astrological signs replaced by new objects and words to represent aspects of life. The poetry laments the frailty of beauty, beginning with "When I do count the clock that tells the time/ And see the brave day sunk in hideous night."įourPlay originally improvised wordless vocals with music set to a metronome at 60 beats per minute to emulate the passage of time, over which the musicians played repeated, or ostinato, cross-rhythms and a slow-moving bassline.
The album's first track, Clock, features what sounds like a ticking timepiece and Gaiman reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 12. "Somewhere in there, we decided to just start creating and make more music. With that song under their belts, "there was kind of no stopping us," Gaiman says. "I'm hoping she ignored my English accent in her work/ Because it's really hard to hang around with saints," Gaiman lyricizes in The Problem with Saints. The musicians got their start performing covers by artists as varied as Radiohead, Metallica and Leonard Cohen.įor a tour that brought them to Carnegie Hall, Gaiman and FourPlay crafted an original song about Joan of Arc, where the historical figure was figuratively brought back from the dead to cause all kinds of problems. Their new collaboration released Friday is a meeting of unconventional minds between Gaiman - whose writing is often so idiosyncratic it's impossible to pin down - and FourPlay, an indie rock band of sorts that happens to be playing the traditional string quartet instruments of two violins, a viola and a cello. I loved the wit," Gaiman tells NPR's Morning Edition, recalling his first collaboration with the quartet in a 2010 Sydney Opera House reading of his novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains. Now, he's setting his sights on music.įor his debut studio album Signs of Life, the British author joins Australia's FourPlay String Quartet in an eclectic blend of classical and indie rock tunes with poetry and prose. From The Sandman and Lucifer to Good Omens, Neil Gaiman has written novels and comics that have been adapted into plays, TV series and films.
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