Author Neil Gaiman has announced that he’s releasing an album: Signs of Life a collaboration with Australia’s FourPlay String Quartet.
Neil Gaiman known best for his literary work American Gods, Sandman, and Coraline, has shared two singles from his forthcoming debut album, Signs of Life. Not so left of center, given his earlier live recitals of short stories and poems, with his wife Amanda Palmer.
The two newly released singles Bloody Sunrise and Credo are gems, kind of like a cross between The Magnetic Fields and the popping vibes of the spoken word Jazz albums of the 60’s.
“Bloody Sunrise,” comes with its own music video. With sultry, dreamy lead vocals from Lara Goodridge, the video opens with Goodridge lying in a coffin before rising to join the rest of the FourPlay String Quartet for a performance in a graveyard. Gaiman appears briefly on a flickering television screen at the beginning of the clip.
Gaiman first collaborated with FourPlay String Quartet back in 2010 for the soundtrack for the novella The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains, which they later performed together.
Gaiman shares: I’m not entirely certain when I fell in love with a string quartet. I remember our first date, though. It was a day spent in a tiny room somewhere in the backstage maze of Sydney Opera House. We played the next night on the stage of the Sydney Opera House. It was remarkable. It was so much fun we did it again. We did a tour together, but when we reached Carnegie Hall, we decided we needed something better than me reading a poem as our encore, so we stole some time from soundcheck and rehearsed a song. And then we performed our song on the stage of the Carnegie Hall, and that felt a lot like something special. We started to build a repertoire, and when I was in Australia we would make music together. These are some of the things we’ve made together. It’s been a long fallow winter, the last two and a half years. Here are signs of life.
Check out the Videos below:
Neil Gaiman’s collab with Australia’s FourPlay String Quartet Due out April 28, 2023, via Instrumental Recordings.
