Product Description
This song is an adaptation of a story that I wrote by the end of last year about a lost child (which is included in my little collection Quand je veux être seule, je ferme les yeux), inspired by one of Franck Harscouët's photos.
It's also largely inspired by the birds of paradise who, when first brought to Europe, had no feet because they were cut off in order to be naturalised, and that was the origin of the name "bird of paradise". I knew the story before, and when I was struggling on the lyrics I went to the exhibition "Paradis d'oiseaux" at l'École Van Cleff & Arpels. It was the last day of the exhibition and I luckily caught the last guided tour, and the guide talked about the importation of birds of paradise again. I found it pretty ironic to think that these birds fly all their lives and never land and to therefore call them "birds of paradise" and assign them all kinds of beautiful and mysterious meanings, while it was humans themselves who invaded their habitats, took them away from their homes, cut their feet and took their lives.
I could say that the "bird with no feet" is the spirit of the child's sister, but honestly, the story itself was just a random collage of elements that I came up with when seeing the photo, and it was not even completed at one time, neither did I actually seriously consider about the symbolism of everything, so it's totally fine to take this just as a story of a kid trying to find his lost sister and a man persuading him to move on, or to see something else in the relationship between the child and the smoker and to take all of the elements as symbols of more abstract concepts. I tried to tell the story like "Long Black Veil" and tried to be simple and precise.
It's the first completed song in about two years and I admit my preferences as well as voice have changed a lot, which makes it sound very different from my old songs. It was recorded in one week at home and arranged during another week.
This product was created by a member of ArrangeMe, Hal Leonard's global self-publishing community of independent composers, arrangers, and songwriters. ArrangeMe allows for the publication of unique arrangements of both popular titles and original compositions from a wide variety of voices and backgrounds.