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The Happiness Project album by Charles Spearin
"Meaning seems to be our hunger but we should still try to taste our food. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing - life and art? - and write music based on these accidental melodies. So I had some musician friends play, as close as they could, these neighbourhood melodies on different instruments (Mrs. Morris on the tenor saxophone, Marisa on the harp, my daughter Ondine on the violin, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs. " -- Charles Spearin


I played this through eight or so times on the dark drive back from the East this Sunday. As I listened, the compositions became more and more complex, and still more startlingly beautiful and touching. The album as a whole project is particularly well arranged- as the tracks range from the wise Mrs. Morris to the nervous (but wholly ethereal) Marisa; as they explain what happiness means to them, what is "important in life", their words create a womb from which music springs. Mood. In joining instrumentation with the spoken word recordings (manipulated for repetition only, as far as I can tell) these highly emotive mood-scapes emerge, each specific to the singularity and mood of the speaker.