La pêche à la baleine: The Story

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My brother, Benjamin Knobil, is an actor and theater author/director, who works mainly in Switzerland. A couple of months back, he called me to say that he was going to be able to fulfill a long-standing fantasy of his, namely, to sing on-stage.

He was invited by a club-owner to sing about the Mediterranean (the region, the culture). He decided he would sing some relevant songs from the French 20th century répertoire, and asked me if I’d be interested in writing some songs for him.

Well, I was stumped for a while, but then managed to write one decent song on this not so inspiring subject.

My brother then started writing lyrics (which had little or no connection to anything Mediterranean, the cheating little weasel!). His first drafts were full of great ideas, but pretty uneven, and I helped him fix them.

This process was the first of several eye-openers for me, as it forced me to analyze and verbally express all sorts of techniques and tricks and artistic standards that I pretty much unconsciously apply to my own output.

I’d then write some music to his lyrics, rearranging or adjusting them to the music in the process. I’d then record a demo, which I would send back to him (he’s in Lausanne, Switzerland and I’m in Paris, France so none of this would have been as convenient and near-instantaneous in the pre-Internet age).

Writing music to these lyrics, and especially singing them, has been in more ways than one a sort of schizophrenic out-of-body experience. My brother and I obviously share a common background, and he has to a large extent the same taste for humor in music, and a voice similar in timbre to mine. So that’s very comfortable and convenient.

We are also different in many ways, and I wouldn’t be able to sing some of his very personal words in the first person in a similar setting. By putting myself in his shoes, on stage, I was able to let go of some of my ego, and write and sing and record in ways that I would never have otherwise attempted.

At the same time, I surprised him more than once, sending him some soft, cool music when he expected frenetic upbeat stuff, and vice versa, but I think that overall, I did a good job, both compositionally, and in a couple of instances, by really « sublimating » his lyrics, if I may be so bold…

So on top of the first song that I wrote alone, we wrote five more songs together in less than two months. (Not fucking bad!) Some I wrote using keyboards & Mac software (Reason & Digital Performer for those who are curious), others were written on (Spanish) guitar. While I am still rather new to the guitar, I think that the guitar-pieces turned out the best, but then I’ve been on a trend towards simplification lately, which is another story.

However, my brother will share the stage with a pianist he has hired for the gigs. She’s an experienced classical and jazz pianist and overall improviser, and the deal is she’ll play and arrange the songs however she (and my Bro) likes. I deliberately paid no attention to this, to maximize my surprise on D-day.

My brother nevertheless sent me a couple of snippets of what she has done so far, and this has been more than the icing on the cake. Hearing somebody else play your music is certainly good for the ego, but hearing it with a totally different arrangement is a further kick (and another somewhat mind bending experience–it’s my stuff, and yet it isn’t, and yet the essence is still there, you get the drift).

We’ll see how it goes, but I sure hope our collaboration won’t end there. It’s been a blast, both creatively and on a personal level. And it’s nice to not work alone!

Furthermore, he likes being on stage, under the spotlights. I don’t. He (hopefully) is a better singer than I am (which isn’t difficult!).

So could this be the start of something big?

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