A Carter Burwell song no more…

by Jonathan on February 10th, 2010

My dear friend the lovely Christine Joly de Lotbinière tells me that not only is today (a blizzard in New York City) the perfect day to stay home from work, it’s also the perfect day to blog. And I can’t disagree with her.

Because of the weather, I’ve been thinking of the music of the prodigiously talented Carter Burwell, whose scores you’ve doubtless heard many times.

First up, his wonderful “She Began to Lie”, from the otherwise forgettable John Travolta thriller THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER . It’s an interesting song, most frequently covered as “Sea Lion Woman” (most recently by Feist), but probably most famous for Nina Simone’s racing, passionate cover, “See Line Woman”. The song’s meaning is somewhat obscure; Burwell is probably closest to the true title, the song lyric a litany of lies a woman tells – I think Simone’s version specifically has the woman as a prostitute (as did all Simone songs, haha, I joke). But I’ve also heard it’s a corruption of an underground railway route, “C-Line”, from the days of slavery. (The “Rock Island Line”, subject of a stomping, slapback rockabilly song by the great Johnny Cash, was also an underground railway line.)

Anyway, when Feist sings:

Sea lion woman, sea lion

She drink coffee, sea lion

She drink tea, sea lion

And rooster crows, sea lion

Sea lion woman

Dressed in red

Smile at the man

Stab him in his back

I’m thinking “Yeah, Feist, maybe… But wouldn’t it work better as ‘she lying woman’?” You can hear Christine and Katherine Shipp sing the original on the fantastic Rounder release A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings ; recorded in the late 1930′s, the song was already old, maybe a work song. It sounds like Burwell sampled that recording for the vocal here, and did the arrangement. But it’s a fantastic arrangement, the skipping beat, the way the banjo is processed (the ghostly backwards banjo at the beginning, the eerie reverb), and the mournful harmonica. Burwell also remixed the song, but the straight version is the one you want…

Sorry about the video, btw – it’s got some tiresome British vocal loop underneath it to convey some sort of political/artistic message.

Stop the presses! I just learned that it’s not Burwell who gets credit for the song, but Greg Hale Jones! My apologies to Mr. Jones – since I’ve already gassed on at length, I’m going to post it here anyway. I’m assuming Mr. Burwell had some say in what was included. The good news is that, while the song is album-only on the General’s Daughter soundtrack, you can buy a 2:39 minute version on Mr. Jones’s EP Now There is a Tree of Ghosts. (That title, by the way, probably refers to one of my favourite records of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which also builds arrangements around samples of traditional singers.) Buying the General’s Daughter soundtrack will get you the 5:20 minute original, plus the shorter, more electronic remix. And hopefully a chunk of change for Mr. Jones.

This next one definitely is a Carter Burwell song, “Bella’s Lullaby” from the Twilight films. I don’t think the films are wildly good, but I enjoy pop cultural phenomena – I saw the first one opening weekend, on a long distance date with a girl who watched it in a cinema in Colorado while I watched in Manhattan. I particularly like the intro to the theme; it reminds me a little of Philip Glass’s lovely score for The Secret Agent.

Finally, one of Burwell’s best-known compositions, his theme from Miller’s Crossing, here used as the score to a beautiful trailer for The Last Guardian by visionary game designer Fumito Ueda, whose Ico kept me sane in the difficult months after 9/11. I had the thrill of meeting Mr. Ueda in Tokyo a few years back, and got to play an early build of Shadow of the Colossus , a huge thing for me. Ueda’s games are characterized by lyrical emotionality; they are elegantly sensual games, shot through with an elegiac undercurrent – everything feels a little sad.

I think this was recorded live at the unveiling of Ueda’s latest project at the E3 games convention in the summer of 2009 – turn up the volume, as it’s quiet…