Before you even listen to the two tracks that make up “Hear The Children Sing & The Evidence,” the long runtime—enough to fill an LP—suggests something interesting is going on, especially considering that these two Lungfish covers originally clocked in around 5 minutes each.
The concept behind the album came from Nathan Salsburg, who discovered that playing the Baltimore punk/post-hardcore band’s “The Evidence” over and over on guitar worked quite nicely as a lullaby for his infant daughter; he invited Will Oldham and Tyler Trotter to attempt turning it into an album.
The results are quite enchanting and beautiful.
Lungfish released albums on the Dischord Records label for more than 20 years. The song ‘The Evidence‘ was featured on their 1994 album Pass and Stow, and the title track, Hear the Children Sing, featured on Love is Love, their 10th full-length album, released in 2003. You can listen to the original below:
Will Oldham, aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, told the Washington Post: When Nathan invited me in, I was gleeful. I couldn’t wait to be inside of these songs in this way that he was describing — pulling them widely apart, temporally, so that there’s lots of room to explore. Each take would allow for multiple iterations of each lyric, walking around the lyrics and observing. Oh, this passageway leads here. This staircase leads here. If I pull this curtain aside and blow the dust off this word, I have access to a whole new level of significance.
The album is out now on Digital/CD/LP via No Quarter.