Strange Messenger
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

      Vocal: Michelle Dockrey
      Guitars & Bass: Tony Fabris
      Percussion: Maya Bohnhoff

He was exploring South America, the first to venture there
In an age of change and reason, new discoveries everywhere
Along the Orinoco, the great river corridor
He heard tell of a people who had fled a tribal war

It was said they chose seclusion over death or life as slaves
But in their sheltered grotto, he found only simple graves
And one brightly colored messenger, whom no one understood
Spoke the language of a people who had disappeared for good

So tell me, bold explorer, as you wandered through the leaves,
Did you ponder unknown losses that the very Cosmos grieves?

Was it halting? Was it flowing? Was it lilting and divine?
Was it fearless as your native tongue, mercurial as mine?
Would it pique a linguist's interest? Would it hold a poet's thrall?
Did the words of one strange messenger tell you anything at all?

He kept a careful chronicle, transcribing what he heard
Of the tribe's entire language, there remained just forty words
Complexity and structure, how it tastes and how it sings
Time devoured all but scattered words for scattered things

And can we archaeologists, with bits of sound like runes
Ever paint a living portrait of a people in their tombs?
Could we somehow come to know them? Will we ever even try?
Sifting through linguistic ruins for the clues to how and why

So tell me, bold explorer, as you wandered through the leaves,
Did you ponder unknown losses that the very Cosmos grieves?

Was it halting? Was it flowing? Was it lilting and divine?
Was it fearless as your native tongue, mercurial as mine?
Would it pique a linguist's interest? Would it hold a poet's thrall?
Do the words of one strange messenger tell us anything at all?

To those who study history, it seems a bitter curse
The loss of language terrible, the lost potential worse
Past and future stories multiplied a thousandfold,
Vanished out of history and never to be toldWere they beautiful and gentle? Would they call us friend or foe?
What wisdom did they live by? What secrets did they know?
It's a symphony reduced to what a single bird can sing
The forest lost their language, and they lost everything

So tell me, bold explorer, as you wandered through the leaves,
Did you ponder unknown losses that the very Cosmos grieves?

Was it halting? Was it flowing? Was it lilting and divine?
Was it fearless as your native tongue, mercurial as mine?
Would it pique a linguist's interest? Would it hold a poet's thrall?
Do the words of one strange messenger tell us anything at all?

About the Song

Vixy:
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, German explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt traveled to South America, most of which still belonged to the Spanish Empire. Humboldt and his French companion spent five years travelling through a region that the Jesuits had left decades earlier.

The village of San Juan Nepomuceno de los Atures (called just Atures by that time) had been built by Jesuits in 1748, taking the last of its names from the native people of the region. But by the time Humboldt arrived, the Atures had disappeared, and the village was in a wretched state. The 47 people still living there spoke languages called Guahibo and Maco, and told Humboldt that the Atures, hunted by a people called the Caribs, had fled to an island in the Orinoco, and died there. All that was left were their tombs in a high mountain cave.

Humboldt wrote:

"It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures - bizarrely - there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures."

- Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, Alexander von Humboldt

- Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Mark Abley

Tony:
One of the best stories about the song happened shortly after our first public performance of the song (which was at Consonance 2008, right after we finished writing it). Seanan tells the story thusly:

Apparently, the words of one strange messenger DO mean something.

I spent my lunch hour walking, as I so very often do, and found myself singing as I walked. Now, once I realized I was singing, I also realized that the song I was in the middle of - 'I Can't Decide', by the Scissor Sisters - was, perhaps, not entirely appropriate, due to language. I promptly switched songs, selecting the much less offensive 'Strange Messenger', by the lovely Vixy.

For those of you who don't know, 'Strange Messenger' is based on one of the stories told about German explorer Alexander von Humboldt, who was one of the first Europeans to enter parts of South America. Supposedly, while he was traveling the Orinoco River, he found the burial ground of an entire lost tribe... and a single parrot who still remembered their language. Forty words of it. (...)

Whether this is true or not doesn't really matter; it's a beautiful story, and it sings to the pain of language, culture, and a people lost. Thanks to Vixy, the story itself can now be sung... and as I was turning off of Market Street, blithely sallying on by, a man grabbed my arm. To quote this unexpected participant in my day:

"I am so sorry, I really didn't mean to, I'm not trying to - IS THAT ABOUT HUMBOLDT'S PARROT?!"

Dude.

Turns out the gentleman is a professor of linguistics at a local college, and has been using that story in his classes for years now. So today, in my capacity as walking billboard, I sold a copy of an album that hasn't even been released yet.

Tomorrow: flying monkeys.

- from the blog of Seanan McGuire

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
I first heard the above story from my friend corvi, who I think was reading the second book referenced above, perhaps a year or two ago. My first thought was that this was one of the most terrible, tragic things I'd ever heard. My second thought was "I'm going to turn that into a song, and I'm going to make people CRY."

The lyrics weren't so difficult; the tragedy of the story is clear. I just had to avoid any hint of "aw poor lonely parrot," which isn't the point at all. I read what I could about Humboldt; among other things, I learned that he wrote a four-volume work called Cosmos (which in modern publication is subtitled A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (Foundations of Natural History), which should give you some idea of the scope of the work!) I wanted to work that into the lyrics somehow. Also, settling on a single adjective to characterize an entire language was... well, I was about to write "no easy task," but actually it was kinda fun. My first thought for German was "bold", but I needed two syllables (and anyway I'd already used "bold explorer"). I forget what other two-syllable adjectives I went through before settling on "fearless". (I don't actually speak German, so I just had to go by how it sounds to me generally when I hear it spoken.) English was surprisingly easy. Our grammar rules are consistent except when they're not, our spelling rules were cobbled together from a bazillion other languages, our phonetics make sense most of the time, if you can keep in mind a rather complex series of rules about different letter combinations, but make frustratingly little sense if you look at individual letters. I didn't set out with a definition and then look for a word to fit it; I set out with a number of syllables to fill (I was originally going for the word "or" plus a three-syllable word), but "mercurial" popped almost instantly into my head. I remember we were in a restaurant or something and Tony asked me what the word meant. A woman at the next table, overhearing the conversation, couldn't help but chime in that "mercurial" was emphatically the word to describe the English language. I think that's when I began to have real confidence in the song; there probably aren't too many songs out there that speak to the interests of linguists. :)

The difficulty was a melody. At the point when I had two verses and a chorus, I still didn't have a melody that I liked. Worse, I did have a melody that I hated. Sometimes things will pop into your head that you don't want. This awful cheesy preachy Hallmark-TV-special theme song melody had lodged itself in my brain and wouldn't leave.

(Someone recently paid me the kindness of saying that I'm "incapable of writing a bad song". If only they knew. It's actually just that I'm capable of recognizing the bad ones before anyone else gets a chance to hear them.)

The only way to exorcise that particular demon was to get the right melody going. I had this vague idea that I wanted the song to sound sort of Latin, but the only thing I knew how to do was put it in 6/8 time. Tony and I worked for what seemed like ages, noodling and trying things and just not getting anywhere. I was actually on the point of giving up on the song entirely when we took a deep breath and tried a different approach. Instead of trying so hard to get a specific pick pattern or a specific melody, we backtracked a bit and got more basic. Tony came up with this haunting minor chord progression that I liked, and instead of trying to sing the lyrics, I just hummed along loosely with the chords. I got out my trusty little digital recorder and recorded him playing and me singing my little cascade of ooo's and aaah's, and we put the song away to percolate a bit.

Later on I was able to listen to that and sort of force the existing lyrics into 6/8 time, and give them a more defined melody, and finish the last verse. Tony worked his usual guitar magic, and lo, we had a song. Be grateful to Tony, everyone, because it's thanks to him that you hear what you hear instead of the awful One-Tin-Soldier-esque version that tried to escape and set itself loose on the world. (Yes, the melody still exists in my head. No, I won't sing it for you.)

About the Recording

Tony:
This was the last song to get written and recorded for Thirteen, with portions of it being finished only days before we went to mastering.

Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff were the cavalry on this one, recording Maya playing bongos, shaker, and goat's feet (yes, you read that right, goat's feet) the weekend before Consonance, which was just a few weeks before our mastering date. They squeezed it into a busy schedule, timing it perfectly so that I got the tracks just a few days before Jeff got laid up with a painful attack of kidney stones.

What I had supplied the Bohnhoffs was a guitar chord progression, a click track, and a rough scratch vocal. The scratch vocal was especially rough, having been the very first time Vixy ever sang the song seriously all the way through. Her opening phrase of the scratch vocal wasn't even at the right pitch, it took her a bit before she was able to find her opening note. We didn't even bother to turn off the furnace before pressing the Record button. These were just guide tracks after all.

Of course, we get the rhythm tracks from Jeff and Maya, and they're just perfect. We're getting ready to head off to Consonance and I've only got Maya's tracks partially edited and mixed, intending to finish the work at the con. We only had couple weeks to go before we had to go to mastering, so Vixy and I talked about doing a final vocal for the song before leaving for the con. You know, just in case she picked up con crud and couldn't sing when we got back. We decided not to record the final vocal just then: Vixy assured me she wouldn't get sick, and I really would have preferred to get all the backing tracks finished first, anyway.

So we head off to Consonace, and I spend most of the con with my head buried in the laptop, editing and mixing Maya's tracks as well as continuing to work on mixes for the other songs on the album.

And of course, Sunday, Vixy picks up con crud. Really bad con crud. Like, it took two months to go away. Winter/spring 2008 was a really bad season for rhinoviruses; everyone I know who caught a cold that season, including me, was completely devastated by it for weeks and weeks. In Vixy's case, it even prevented us from going to Norwescon a couple weeks later.

The day after Consonance, we're looking at the schedule and I realize that Strange Messenger isn't going to make it onto the album unless we can get a vocal. And we're not going to get a vocal out of Vixy this week, the cold is only going to get worse. So with the last vestiges of her remaining voice, I stuck her behind the microphone and made her re-sing the opening phrase. She was able to do it, barely, on the first take, then collapsed into a coughing fit and could sing no more.

So what you get on the album is Vixy's scratch vocal, the very first time she ever sang the song seriously all the way through. And an opening phrase that was sung under duress and while deathly ill. I had to put a whole series of notch filters on it to get rid of the furnace's hum, but I think it sounds pretty good in the final mix.

Vixy:
After hearing about this, Seanan asked me something like, "And did you learn a little lesson, then?" Did we ever. No matter what you're doing, treat everything as if it were the final take. Wait 'til the dogs outside stop barking, have a good drink of water, and TURN THE STUPID FURNACE OFF.