THE BOOKS, Free Translator (from The Way Out, 2010)

This song isn’t a new discovery, but somehow I managed to miss its back story when I heard it originally. It’s based on the band’s discovery of the website freetranslation.com. The story is best told in their own words:

For this track we took a very well known folk song (which we’ve been advised not to name) and using free translation software, we translated the text into, for example, German, then into Italian, then into French, then into Swedish and then back into English.  The results were spectacular.  All of the imagery became completely warped, sentence structure was geniusly scrambled, errant nouns would inexplicably enter into strange situations… it became a machine free association on the original lyrics to the point that the ‘cover’ became a new original.  Who wrote the song became completely unclear at this point… it became some mass collaboration of linguists, programmers and songsmiths.  Both Paul and I translated an retranslated these lyrics so many times that new characters began to emerge and we made a collection of the best moments in our texts.  I then set them to the music the best I could, adding conjunctions and fixing the rhythm of the sentences where necessary to make a smooth vocal line.

And to elaborate on the band’s approach in general, I find this description quite endearing:

I think part of what we’re trying to do with the Books is to break the back of language, to bend it until it snaps and then examine the pieces to see what of it’s essence remains.  Poets and songwriters have been in business so long, trying to say things in just the perfect way that they’ve crowded out the front door to meaning which is all tightly locked up by cliches.  Essentially we’re looking for the back way around. So it’s really heartening to find a site like freetranslation.com that so egolessly shreds language like it’s making a vat of sauerkraut out of your precious word cabbages.

The song is so sparse and calming - who would have imagined it holds such an involved structure?!

For more info on the band click here and here.