Last Stories.

An inspired project led by Brisbane songwriter Simon Munro pairs musicians with Australian poets, living and dead, to create an album of lyrical beauty, writes Dave Faulkner.

Simon Munro first came up with the idea for Borrowed Verse in 2012. For two years, the Brisbane songwriter had been adapting poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Judith Wright and turning them into songs when, as he describes it, “a light bulb went off ” in his head. “This is not a landscape that is really explored in pop music or folk music,” Munro said when I interviewed him two weeks ago. “I just enjoyed the process and really saw the value in it.” That was the moment he decided to expand his private project to include other songwriters. Now, six years later, Borrowed Verse is the exciting result.

Of the 12 songs that make up this album, 11 were newly composed by eight different Australian singersongwriters, including Munro, setting to music the poems of nine different Australian poets, five of whom are still active. The single exception was “Where Corals Lie”, which was composed in 1888 by Sir Edward

Elgar, from a poem written 30 years earlier by fellow Englishman Richard Garnett. Ben Salter chose the

Elgar song for Borrowed Verse and he also sang his own composition, “Tracks”, an adaptation of Herb Wharton’s poem. Salter’s uncomplicated, crystal clear delivery makes the songs sound like companion pieces, somehow managing to bridge a gulf that spans centuries and cultures. This feeling of musical communion holds true for the entire album. A disparate group of artists, largely working in isolation, united their talents to create a consistent, coherent and thoroughly enjoyable album. But more than that, Borrowed Verse is a fascinating insight into the nexus between music and spoken verse.

Another songwriter who provided two tracks for the album was Glenn Richards, the lead singer of Augie March. His first, “A Strange Bird”, was based on Michael Dransfield’s short poem and it opens the album. Dransfield was a doomed genius who died in 1973 at the age of 24, having already written nearly a thousand poems. “A Strange Bird” is haiku-like in its economy, and Richards’ plaintive melody adds a touch of melancholy to the poet’s acerbic words, turning it into a lament: it is a strange bird this world whose habit is to fight itself whose left wing and right wing tear themselves bitterly apart

Comprising only 12 lines, Richards chooses to repeat several stanzas and the opening couplet becomes a haunting refrain.

His second contribution required a little more musical dexterity. Kenneth Slessor’s “Mephistopheles Perverted, or Goethe for the Times” is wordier and consequently more unwieldy, but Richards devised an inspired solution. He framed the verses in a call-and-response structure, alternating lines between the lead and backing vocals (indicated here in parentheses):

Once long ago there lived a Flea

(Who kept such a fine, fat King)

Not that he held with royalty

(But more for the appearance of the thing)

And gave his Majesty to hold

(Such pageantries are far too few)

A sword of ruby-hilted gold

(That possibly might hack a cheese in two)

But lest this glory might begin

(To prove the regency too far)

His thunderbolt they made of tin

And changed his godship for another Star.

Both of Richards’ songs could be described as dream pop though “Mephistopheles Perverted”, which he recorded with Augie March, has a touch of ’70s prog, or as Richards prefers to call it, “space rock”.

Sandwiched between “A Strange Bird” and “Mephistopheles Perverted” on the album is “Morbid Fascination”, composed and performed by Tom Cooney. This is the first of the songs based on the work of a living poet, in this case Pascalle Burton. Burton is a musician herself and she appears elsewhere on this album as a member of Brisbane’s The Stress of Leisure, who perform their quirky adaptation of “Straws” by another contemporary Queensland poet, David Stavanger. I spoke to Burton last week and she told me it was Cooney who first got her involved in Borrowed Verse. After a bit of back and forth, she said, “I sent Tom a manuscript and he picked it very quickly, and he wrote me back, saying ‘I’ve just done a song for “Morbid Fascination”’, so it was very quick.” When I asked Burton for her reaction to Cooney’s arrangement, she replied, “It’s an electrifying feeling, actually. This is another reincarnation of that poem and it’s something I wouldn’t naturally have done.” Burton often performs her own poems using visuals and sonic landscapes. “I usually use weird things like synthesisers and circuit bent things,” she said,

“You know, just more experimental things, and he’s got this kind of crooner approach in his singing and it was completely unexpected.” Cooney’s folky style may appear conventional on the surface but his astringent take on “Morbid Fascination” has a raw, minimalist edge.

Although poetry and lyrics may have a lot in common, they are not interchangeable. One of the pitfalls of adapting a fixed text is what I like to call the Spicks and Specks syndrome. The ABC’s quiz show regularly featured a game where participants sang randomly chosen passages from a book using the tune of a well-known song. In the game, the strictures of the melody often made the words nonsensical, with melodic emphasis landing on unstressed syllables and line breaks occurring at illogical points in the text. When the natural cadence of the lyric doesn’t match the cadence of the melody, the results are jarring and often absurd, proving that no one can actually sing the telephone book pleasingly.

The songs on Borrowed Verse betray no sign of this syndrome, although there were one or two close calls, and all of the songwriters must be applauded for this. Angie Hart is just one whose contributions are flawless. Her settings of “The Bee Hut” and “Not the Same” are masterpieces of understatement, giving Dorothy Porter’s exquisite words gossamer wings. Porter wrote both poems after undergoing surgery for breast cancer, an intervention that ultimately proved futile. “The Bee Hut” is playful and joyous, revelling in wonder, and Hart’s music amplifies those emotions. “Not the Same” is more sombre, almost religious in tone, but Hart’s delicate melody and the hushed jazz trio accompaniment transform Porter’s words into a tender torch song, with a palpable sense of spiritual awakening despite the gathering darkness.

In every instance, the songwriters on Borrowed Verse have shown enormous respect towards their chosen poems. When I remarked to Hart that she hadn’t altered the texts in the slightest, she laughed. “I wouldn’t dare,” she said. “It’s not my territory to be deciding how somebody should have said things differently, and a beautiful challenge to decide how the music can work around what they created.”

Unfortunately for Jessie L. Warren, she only discovered she had inadvertently altered a significant word of Maria Zajkowski’s “Dear John” just prior to final mastering, when it was too late to change. Warren was beside herself when she realised. “I totally lost my mind for an afternoon,” she told me. When she finally