Bowerbirds: Saving the Earth Through Anthropomorphism

Last week we discussed songs (or the lack thereof) describing the alien landscape that made existentialism so easy in Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World. While Keane’s song “Bedshaped” put into words the intangible feeling of haziness that enables this polar rumination, I had a hard time thinking up songs specifically about setting; that is, songs about place.

Then I saw Bowerbirds, opening for Bon Iver at Black Cat. Hailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, their docile, creaking folk keeps close ties to home, whether it be the North Carolina woods, a vague lakeside memory, or the very house they write in.

One scientist in Encounters says Antarctica feels like a living being, that its constant drifting and shifting — and its push-and-pull relationship with climate change — make him feel like he lives aboard a giant creature. (This quote doesn’t seem to be online; anyone have it?) In the song “My Oldest Memory,” off Bowerbirds’ album Hymns for a Dark Horse, the band sings about a natural haven preserved in memory:

And I dont know whose land we’re on
Is this an island that plots like a villain,
Or an old ghost friend we don’t believe in?

The verses flip like a photo album of a hike along the water: “Out where the waves wrestle with the dirty brine,” the band crosses sand and thicket to rest their heads in the nooks of a cypress. In the memory, recalled through the lens of a child, the land becomes a mystical character, large beyond comprehension. Now, looking back as adults, the picture is foggier: Is nature still an omnipresent spirit as it was during those barefoot and carefree summers? Or is it slowly dying at the hands of amnesia, fading like Tinkerbell as it disappears from our modern, responsible lives?

MP3: Bowerbirds – “My Oldest Memory”

Keane on Encounters at the End of the World, Existentialism

Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World documents daily life and existentialism at McMurdo, Antarctica’s largest base, village, and human community. The alien landscapes surrounding the settlement are like photo negatives of familiar environments — mountains look like seabed, caverns darken underwater.

The film is one-half interviews with the scientists that inhabit McMurdo, wondrously pondering their existence on the living continent that shifts under them. But the movie is equal parts moving photography, as wordless scenes of animated landscapes and surreal wildlife float by in luminous shades of deepwater blue.

I tried to think of songs about this type of alien landscape, but they’re tough to come by; even tougher was finding a song about things like these utterly weird sea stars. But in terms of cataloging the abstract blindness, the complete isolation that allows Herzog’s philosophical ruminations, Keane does an admirable job in “Bedshaped,” the closing track to their debut, Hopes and Fears:

You’ll follow me back
With the sun in your eyes
And on your own
Bedshaped
And legs of stone

The song’s actually about an erstwhile lover of the singer who has moved on without him. But the blindness of “sun in your eyes” matches the whiteout of an Antarctic wanderer, while “bedshaped, and legs of stone” is his heavy gait, legs atrophied, as he staggers through a depthless snowstorm. In the song, the whiteout compels a doubtful ex-lover to follow her beau; in Encounters, it lets a once-scattered collection of explorers look inward.

MP3: Keane – “Bedshaped”