The music and lyrics were written by Neil Gaiman, and performed by the FourPlay String Quartet, an Australian group who Gaiman first collaborated with back in 2010 for the soundtrack to his novella The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains. Here's what Gaiman had to say about this new project:
I'm not entirely certain when I fell in love with a string quartet. I remember our first date, though. It was a day spent in a tiny room somewhere in the backstage maze of Sydney Opera House. We played the next night on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. It was remarkable. It was so much fun we did it again. We did a tour together, but when we reached Carnegie Hall, we decided we needed something better than me reading a poem as our encore, so we stole some time from soundcheck and rehearsed a song. And then we performed our song on the stage of the Carnegie Hall, and that felt a lot like something special. We started to build a repertoire, and when I was in Australia we would make music together. These are some of the things we've made together. It's been a long fallow winter, the last two and a half years. Here are signs of life.
Neil Gaiman and the FourPlay String Quartet will release their debut full-length album, Signs of Life, in April 2023.
Image: Manfred Werner – Tsui / Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
