One Saturday in April, at a Manhattan recording
studio strewn with antique lamps and masked technicians, singer
Liv Warfield’s
face was clouded in concentration as she layered harmonies into the outro of a
rousing soul number. She noodled for a while, trying to work out which notes to
add next. “We might have to go to the rafters,” she concluded.
اضافة اعلان
The session engineer played back the track, and Warfield got
to work, reaching into the upper parts of her range. On the other side of the
glass separating the recording booth from the console, producer Ray Angry stood
and yelped in approval: “No Auto-Tune in this session!”
The song, called “#NewBornAgain,” feels of the moment, with
lyrics that reference
COVID-19 and its historical antecedent, the influenza
pandemic that swept the globe a century ago (“It’s like we’ve been here
before/When 1919 stole the show”). Warfield, a former member of Prince’s New
Power Generation who has released two alt-R&B albums of her own, wrote the
lyrics herself. But she worked, indirectly, with collaborators from a previous
generation: the writers of an old hymn of the same name (minus the hashtag), on
which the song is based.
This sort of dialogue between past and present is a central
feature of “Public Domain,” a project that Warfield was brought into by its
creators, the singer Angry and visual artist Katherine McMahon. With support
from a wide cast of collaborators, Angry and McMahon are taking songs from the
public domain — a class of creative works whose copyright protections have
expired or been otherwise forfeited, making them freely available for public
use — and reimagining them for the present moment.
Arriving Monday, “#NewBornAgain” — a stomper with sonic
references including the Staple Singers, Prince and the bluesman R.L. Burnside
— is the first single from what will ultimately become “Public Domain,” the
album. Warfield’s rewrite strips the original of its religious overtones,
changing its uplifting message about rebirth through faith to one of
exasperation, a plea for reprieve from the punishing cycles of history.
“Reliving the same stories, circling through time/Where are the superheroes we
thought would save our lives?” sings songwriter J. Hoard, who also contributed
vocals to the track.
Angry, who has worked with Christina Aguilera, Ja Rule and
Solange, met McMahon years ago through a mutual friend. But the two didn’t
develop a creative partnership until last summer, when they staged a
performance called “Free Clean Money” at Guild Hall, an arts center in East
Hampton, New York. That piece involved dousing $1 bills with Lysol and handing
them out to visitors — both a reference to public fear about viral
contamination and a salutary gesture for an economic system in which money is,
in their estimation, neither free nor clean. Angry scored the performance with
a composition inspired by the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, bringing the
topic of racial injustice into dialogue with matters of economic inequality and
pandemic anxiety. Both said that their collaboration felt novel and exciting.
For McMahon, who is primarily a painter, undertaking a music
project is something of a creative leap. At the recent recording session, she
was a quiet but focused presence, with a notepad in hand and pen tucked behind
her ear, scribbling in between takes.
While Angry heads up production and arrangements for all the
songs, she’s acting as more of a creative director, selecting source material
and rewriting lyrics, or guiding other collaborators as they conceptualize
updated versions of old texts. “Katherine really knows what she wants,”
Warfield told me, and McMahon agreed: “I definitely had a vision early on,” she
said.
That vision is responsive to today’s societal challenges.
Like “Free Clean Money,” “Public Domain” seeks to address big-picture
structural issues exacerbated by the pandemic. One song reworks Irving Berlin’s
1924 ballad “All Alone” with new lyrics about racism and discrimination in
America, penned by gospel singer Jermaine Dolly. The project also examines the
more personal plights that many have experienced over the past year, like
loneliness and substance abuse — as in “#AlcoholicBlues,” a contemporary take
on a Prohibition-era tune (all of the songs are titled with hashtags). Overall,
McMahon said she’s sought out texts that could “speak to the existential dread
of modern life.”
The project is taking shape against a backdrop of heightened
public interest in the legal guardrails that protect ownership and use of
musical works. Lately, music industry heavyweights — including
Taylor Swift,
who is rerecording the parts of her catalog she no longer controls, and Bob
Dylan, who sold the publishing rights to his entire catalog — have made
headlines for nine-figure business deals involving their copyrights. With their
project, McMahon and Angry are taking a longer view of music’s life cycle, and
considering the value that it retains even when it’s no longer a financial
asset — that is, its potential to create community, supply inspiration and
prompt reflection. And in reauthoring and building on the work of other
creators (something that musicians do all the time, with or without formal
permission), the project applies pressure to the notion that an idea can be
possessed by a single person.
In Angry’s mind, concerns about ownership are secondary to
concerns about fairness. This thinking is at the heart of Mister Goldfinger
Music, a new label he’s starting; he plans for “Public Domain” to be its first
release. Motivated by some of the shady deals he has witnessed during his many
years in the industry, he’s striving to develop transparent, ethical business
practices that supply up-and-coming musicians with the information and
infrastructure they need to grow.
“I really want to empower artists to be brave and make the
music that’s on their hearts and collaborate with people that they normally
wouldn’t,” he said.
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