Track By Track: Exploring Birdsong - 'The Thing With Feathers'
Hotly tipped trio - Exploring Birdsong have just released their debut EP ‘The Thing With Feathers’ via Long Branch Records. The EP sees the band fueling progressive pop and rock influences with a piano-led sound. ‘The Thing With Feathers’ is a concept release based around the Seamus Heaney poem ‘Bye Child’, the band took a moment to talk to us about the EP - track by track.
Hope
Out of all the tracks that are on The Thing With Feathers, ‘Hope’ was written last. It actually came about by Jonny jokingly playing about with different sounds on his keyboard until he stumbled across the sound you hear on the track, where we all stopped and went ‘hang on…’. It was also originally intended to be just used live, but we loved it too much to not include it on the EP.
The River
As one of our earliest written songs, The River is the first of our releases to reveal our heavier side. Like a number of our songs, the majority of it was written in an intense, short writing session in Matt’s bedroom during our second year of university at about 2am. Jonny and Lyns started figuring out the arrangement of the second verse whilst Matt sat in the bathroom and wrote the lyrics to the chorus! Lyrically, it follows the idea that based on perception, good and evil are never too far from each other and you may never really fully be able to have one without the other.
The Sinking Question
Originally, The Sinking Question and The River were intertwined as part of the same song - that would’ve been much longer than them both individually. But during it’s evolution, we hit a wall which led us to separating the two ideas to form songs in their own right. The lyrics are a representation of the protagonist’s emotions that will possibly never be able to surface.
The Thing With Feathers
There are a lot of religious metaphors on the EP, however the title track is a direct musical homage to religious choral tendencies.
The Baptism
An older version of The Baptism was the first song we self released back in 2017. The majority of the song is that old, it was written mostly before Jonny even joined the band - but his addition led to a song that as 18 year old undergraduates, we were, and still are, extremely proud of. A year following it’s release, an animated music video designed by Emmett Elvin (Knifeworld) was released that was subsequently nominated for Video of the Year at the 2019 Progressive Music Awards.
The Downpour
The Downpour has always has been a special song for us. Written more or less in the space of a night, the song focusses directly on loss, and the emotional turmoil that can come with it. With this is mind, our intention was to leave it open to interpretation lyrically - due to the emotional nature of the lyrical content, we felt it important that the listener is able to make the song as personal to them as it is us.
Deliverance
As a bonus track, Deliverance is one of our most ‘out there’ songs. It probably took us the longest to write out of all our songs, and shows a side that is much more erratic than the rest of our material. It’s also probably the the most challenging out of all our songs to perform live!
Debut EP ‘The Thing With Feathers’, out now via, Long Branch Records