Introducing the 2024 Public Song Project

[MUSIC - Alice J. Lee: The Prisoner's Song]

Brian Lehrer: Hey, that's not the Brian Lehrer Show theme, it's a much older song than that. I'll tell you why in a minute. Let's listen to a little. That was a snippet of Alice Lee's rendition of Prisoner's Song, one of the three winning submissions in last year's Public Songs Project, a project of WNYC's All of It. Every year, a few thousand pieces of art and music enter the US public domain, and the Public Song Project invites listeners to explore this trove of material and give an old work, a new creative life.

Alice Lee's musical adaptation of Vernon Dalhart's the Prisoner's Song is as good an example as any of how ingenious and imaginative the results can be. We'll learn more about All Of It's Public Song Project now back for a second year, including how you can enter with Simon Close, All Of It Producer, who used to be a Brian Lehrer show producer. Now he's on to better things. Hi, Simon, I'm so glad you could join us on the air.

Simon Close: Hi, Brian. I'm really excited to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to say anything about the song we opened with or the material in the public domain from which it was adapted?

Simon Close: Sure. I can give a little background on it. The Prisoner's Song was first released in 1924, I think, by Vernon Dalhart. It was, as far as I can tell, according to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, basically the first Country music hit. It was the first to sell multiple millions of copies and helped establish Country as a genre.

Brian Lehrer: By way of background, for everybody who doesn't know about it yet, what is the Public Song Project? What are you inviting listeners to do to participate this year?

Simon Close: The Public Song Project is basically an open invitation for anybody to take work from the public domain, so that can include songs, or movies, or books, and make new musical recordings out of it. You don't need to be a pro, you can be an amateur. We're asking everyone to make these musical recordings, send them into us, and we'll collect all of them and put them in this big playlist on our website.

Besides the prize being, I guess, besides the warm, fuzzy feeling you get from joining a community project and creating a new piece of art is that we'll select a few of our favorite submissions. They'll have a chance to get their songs played on WNYC and get interviewed about them.

Brian Lehrer: Let's listen to part of another one of the 2023 winners. Here's Afternoon On A Hill by Chloe and Lily Holgate.

[MUSIC - Chloe and Lily Holgate: Afternoon On A Hill]

That is so beautiful. I could just listen and listen to that. I'll admit a personal thing here, Simon, I was getting chills listening to that because I knew Chloe and Lily Holgate when they were kids. They went to music school with one of my kids, and now they grew up to be winners of the Public Song Project. I had no idea until right now.

Simon Close: Oh my gosh.

Brian Lehrer: What are you thinking listening back to that?

Simon Close: I'm thinking a few things. First, that's amazing. What I love about what they did for their song is that a lot of submissions we've gotten for this are straight covers of songs, but they decided instead to take an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and write original music for it. It was a really creative way to adapt a different nonmusical work from the public domain and make a new song out of it.

I think that's also interesting to think about in the context of having listened to Alice Lee's Prisoner's Song because she did a different, but also really creative thing where she took a song from the past but added really modern production sounds like James Blake-inspired beats to the back of it. Both of those songs together, I think, show the breadth of possibilities that you can do with songs for this project.

Brian Lehrer: We won't have time to play a snippet of the other submission that won last year, but we'll just say it was a wonderfully inventive rendition of I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream by Kathryn "Kat" Lewis. We encourage listeners to check it out, which you still can do online. If we had time, we could keep listening to 2023 submissions all day, even some of the ones that didn't win. Since we can't do that, Simon, walk us through the rules for this year's contest.

Simon Close: Sure. This year, the rules are pretty much the same as last year. We're asking you to cover a song, adaptive work from the public domain, make a musical recording out of it, send it in to us by May 12th. The slight difference this year is that we're asking people to focus on the 1920s. Ideally, you're picking a song or a movie or a book that was published between 1920 and '28.

The reason for that is that 1928 is where the public domain cuts off, so the stuff that entered the public domain this year is from 1928. Beyond that, the reason for that decade is, one, that a century is a nice round number, and also that WNYC is actually celebrating its own centennial this year. I thought that cutoff would be a good nod to that fact.

Brian Lehrer: That's right. You don't have to be as talented musically as Lily and Chloe Holgate to enter. Last year, some of you might have seen, I put in a really bad video of me playing an electronic wind instrument on a Duke Ellington song that went into the public domain last year. I'll do something again with this year's material. I'll have to figure out what. There's a neat new detail this year that involves some familiar names, right?

Simon Close: Yes, that's right. In addition to the open public submissions we're getting, we also have some friends of WNYC submitting songs. If you, the listener, send in a song, you have the chance to have your song featured on our website and potentially on air alongside musicians like Rhiannon Giddens, Arturo O'Farrill, who I know was a BL Show guest recently.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Simon Close: Béla Fleck, Valerie June, a bunch of other artists that we've announced some of them, and we'll be announcing the rest over the next few months.

Brian Lehrer: One of the names that may soon be familiar to music lovers in our listenership is the Chicago-based Indie band, Friko. Is that how you say it, F-R-I-K-O? I don't know them.

Simon Close: Yes, that's right.

Brian Lehrer: Friko, they contributed a song called Deep in My Heart, Dear. Here's a snippet of that.

[MUSIC - Friko: Deep in My Heart, Dear]

We've heard three very different sounds now in the three tracks we played. It must be so much fun to listen to such an eclectic range of submissions, Simon.

Simon Close: Definitely, yes. I love how Zane Friko's version was.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think makes a good submission for listeners out there who might be hearing this and thinking, "Yes, I sing a little, I play a little, but I'm not Béla Fleck, I'm not Rhiannon Giddens. I can do a little something." What's a good little bit of one tip or two for people who want to submit?

Simon Close: There are a couple of things that come to mind. One of them, I guess, is in my mind, a good submission is one that adds a new layer of meaning or of feeling to the song. That can be obviously through just plain old musicianship, adding new production, modern elements to a song. Another way, if you're not necessarily a musician, you can rewrite lyrics to an old song. You can engage with the context and the history of the song and the lyrical meaning of it in a new way, even if you're not a pro guitarist or pianist.

Brian Lehrer: In other words, once they enter the public domain, you can have your way with these songs and mangle them in any way you so choose if you find it to be creative.

Simon Close: Exactly. You can change the melodies, you can change the lyrics, you can change all sorts of things. The other thing that comes to my mind, especially after listening to the Friko song, is that a good submission is also one that maybe you just have a personal connection to and can tell a story about why you chose it. The reason that the Friko song comes to mind for me, or the Friko song brings that to my mind, is that that song after they submitted it to us, I shared it with my grandmother.

She got back to me and told me how she and my grandfather knew that song from a 1950s movie adaptation of the operetta the song originally comes from. After they saw that movie for years, my grandfather would walk around the house humming and singing that song. My grandfather passed away fairly recently, and so I wouldn't have known that otherwise. Now it's a song that I walk around the house singing and humming to. I think that there's a lot of room in this project for that kind of personal storytelling engagement with what the songs mean to each person.

Brian Lehrer: Give people a little idea of songs that have come into the public domain, just this year that now become eligible for this creative treatment. Do you have any favorite works that just entered the public domain this year?

Simon Close: Sure. I'll name a bunch of different kinds of works. One of them is Fats Waller, the pianist. He wrote a musical in 1928, called Keep Shufflin', which I believe was meant to be a sequel to the more popular musical from earlier in the 1920s Shuffle Along. That's music that you could adapt, you could pull from that musical to create your new song. Besides music, Orlando by Virginia Woolf came into the public domain this year.

There's really beautifully illustrated book called Millions of Cats by Newbery award winner Wanda Gág. The first of many people know this already, but the first film appearance of Mickey Mouse entered the public domain this year. Besides that, there are also some sound recordings from earlier in the 1920s that entered the public domain this year, and one of the ones that I really love is a song called, Yes We Have No Bananas, which is a song about a store that has no bananas, but it has a lot of other stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Just tell people as we run out of time, how they can find out more, and how to submit something.

Simon Close: Sure. You can find out more on our website. That's wnyc.org/publicsongproject. We have more information on there about resources for exploring the public domain. We also have some links for-- you can record these songs just in your own home, but our friends at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Westport Public Library in Connecticut we've linked to their recording studios that are free to use for anyone who wants to record a song in a more of a studio space for this.

Brian Lehrer: Neat.

Simon Close: Yes, very cool.

Brian Lehrer: Simon Close, All Of It Producer on a 2024 Public Song Project here at WNYC. Thanks so much for telling us about it, Simon.

Simon Close: Thank you, Brian. Before I go, I just want to say I started as an intern here in 2017. I learned how to do public projects like this from you and the rest of the BL team, so thank you so much for having me on to talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Great to see you doing such great work. Brian Lehrer on WNYC, more to come.

 

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