The Happiness Project
Though I know there’s probably something a little simplistic and even juvenile about having ‘a favourite band’, if I were forced to pick one – just one band that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life without – it would have to be Do Make Say Think. While I suppose my predilection for postrock dates me a bit (it being a very ‘you were in your twenties at the start of the new millenium’ thing), I’m okay with that. So you can imagine how incredibly stoked I was to see them live for the first time this past weekend.
What was even more enjoyable though, was how surprisingly great the ‘opening act’ were. I say ‘opening act’ because The Happiness Project is just the name for an experimental project headed-up by DMST member Charles Spearin and populated with others from the band.
The project involved Spearin inviting his neighbours over and, as the name suggests, asking them about happiness and seeing what came up. Spearin then took both the melody and cadence of each person’s speech and, with the help of other Do Makes, created music from it. I know it sounds like it could be quite gimmicky – but it has really turned into something beautiful. Spearin has very carefully chosen which parts of the conversation to emphasise, perhaps most affectingly in the story of Vanessa, who was born deaf but had a cochlear implant put in at the age of 30. In describing the experience of learning to hear, she says “all of a sudden / I felt my body / moving inside”, which becomes one of the refrains of the song. It’s pretty astounding stuff. Below is a video from a show in Portland (and here’s another slightly more truncated one from the Music Gallery in Toronto, where you should really wait ’til the end). The album version of that track can be found here.
Sufi mystics often insist that the outward expulsion of breath is an assertion of the divine presence (you deconstructionists, shut up for a sec). It’s for this reason that so many Sufi singers insert a ‘hoo’ at the end of ‘Allah’, which you can see in action in here. I’m not, of course, bringing this up to suggest that The Happiness Project is divine. But this emphasis on both the musicality and sublimity of speech, particularly captured in these quiet, intimate moments between ordinary people – well, it’s a pleasure to behold. The album is available on both iTunes and eMusic.
Note 1: I’m quite used to rock shows. But the DMST show was LOUD – like, insanely so. There were moments of crescendo in which the music descended into a shrill roar, and it felt as if a wall of sound was breaking at the edge of my ears. I totally understand how the experience of being overwhelmed by something – of letting yourself just drown in sound – can be amazing.This, however, was way too much. My ears shouldn’t be ringing two days after a show.
Note 2: I absolutely and definitely have not developed any sort of harmless crush on DMST member Julie Penner – and anyone who tells you I have is a dirty rotten liar.
