April 27, 2023, 9:07am
Neil Gaiman has his first full-length album coming out, a collaboration with Australian indie string quartet FourPlay called Signs of Life. Gaiman, obviously, has tried his hand at all kinds of writing—adapted myth, tv, comics—and has now written a record’s worth of prose and poetry set to music.
As Gaiman told NPR:
The joy of getting to do this stuff with FourPlay is we got to do everything. So we got to do stuff like that where what I’m saying has to absolutely line up with what they’re playing. And then there are mad things like Bloody Sunrise, where I wrote a very silly song about a lonely, heartbroken vampire.
Here is the silly song in question, in which Gaiman does more than passable back-up duty on vocals for the chorus.
On a less silly note, another track on the album has Gaiman reading Shakespeare sonnets over FourPlay’s metronomically rigorous contemporary classical (which calls to mind Max Richter’s work in collaboration with actors reading text.)
For the Neil Gaiman completionist in your life!