We have released Montparnasse Waltz - lyric and melody by Patrick O'Sullivan.
1.
This is Track 8 of the incremental album, Harney sings O'Sullivan. You can hear Montparnasse Waltz on the music platforms, and you can see the album coming together...
Montparnasse Waltz
On YouTube...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-X_h6oOYKo
On Spotify
https://open.spotify.com/track/0qfhsUDqK8CNwvaiNHU3b4?si=899254573c8a4bc3
YouTube Playlist Overview
https://studio.youtube.com/playlist/PL8CXHKXfP1sd8lyFLQLllhQm2KWZMVS1I/videos
Spotify Artist Overview
https://artists.spotify.com/c/artist/3z7aYsCGwhPh7mJ0apzu4u/profile/overview
And, in due course, on every music platform - wherever you find your music...
2.
My thanks to Shannon Marie Harney, who has doggedly stuck with this project.
And who, with this song, has delivered something delicate...
And, as ever, thanks to Danny Yates, City Sound Studios...
https://www.citysoundstudios.com/
3.
By happenstance (perhaps) we have now issued recordings of two songs whose lyrics connect with my academic work, and activities in my other lives. Indeed, there is a danger that Montparnasse Waltz will turn into a song version of a roman-à-clef.
(The coinage 'chanson-à-clef' does not really work - all songs have clefs, and we are always searching for the right key. Which, in my case, is usually G.)
I am going to park all that for the time being. In due course people who want the texts and stories can have them. For now, as one poet friend, K. E. Smith, has put it, Montparnasse Waltz is about the shock discovery that our guru has feet of clay... And, as ever, my thanks to Ken Smith for his careful readings of text...
4.
But I can tell you how this song, Montparnasse Waltz, found its shape. The idea had waited in my notebook for
years. It was only in 2022 that
I sat down - found the brain health and space - to decide where the lyric
wanted to go. In 2023 I worked it out.
I wanted to stay in a ballad structure - with really solid ABAB, hardworking rhymes, and stay in ballad metre. The rhymes are in charge.
I took a first draft to Danny Yates, and said, I want to set this as a Waltz.
The second draft made more visible, and audible, the waltziness of the piece - we move from 4/4 time to 3/4. The melodies are mine, but obviously pay attention to ballad melodies. But in 3/4 time...
My reading at the time included Colm O Lochlainn, Irish Street Ballads - two lovely volumes, 1939 and 1965, now back on the shelves behind me. O Lochlainn prints ballad texts, based on his own collection of nineteenth century broadside ballads, alongside melodies that these lyrics would have been sung to in his time...
These are links to the O Lochlainn collection at University College Dublin...
http://digital.ucd.ie/view-media/ivrla:6274/canvas/ivrla:6275
https://www.ucd.ie/specialcollections/print/olochlainnbooks/
I think that the balladness is still there in my lyric, Montparnasse Waltz - ballad simplicity...
'There came a young man from the east...'
...And in the melodies. We are all dipping our toes into the great lake of ballad melodies. But mine is a waltz.
5.
I will write a separate blog entry on the graphic design decisions that went into the making of the Harney sings O'Sullivan art work, album and singles. You can see that, again with this album, we signal the approach of the complete album in the design - and occasionally we have added extra information in our choice of font.
The Montparnasse Waltz design signals Paris in its use of the original Hector Guimard Paris Metro font - this design, by Andrew Milne, makes use of the work of Luc Devroye, McGill University, Canada.
http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-43924.html
My thanks to Andrew Milne - who persuaded me to accept the brave decision to use that authentic, distorted, Guimard tall letter P in Parnasse...
And then - with voice and guitar, Shannon Marie Harney and Danny Yates - we took the song to Paris, to that Café. You know the one? No, not that one - the other one. Half way up the hill...
Patrick O'Sullivan
February 2024
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