Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is October Project. October Project features award-winning composer Emil Adler, internationally acclaimed poet-lyricist Julie Flanders, and transcendent lead vocalist Marina Belica. Powered by Flanders’ words, Adler’s music, and the group’s trademark harmonies, October Project has enjoyed sustained popularity and longevity around the world with the timeless impact of its material and powerful artistry of its vocals. They have sold over a half-million records with headline tours throughout the country and songs featured widely on television, radio, and film.
With Sounds True, October Project has released a new album called The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace.
In this podcast, October Project and I spoke about singing in rounds—the intricacies of the music, the harmonies, and how the entire experience can be likened to enjoying the elegance and precision of a Japanese tea ceremony. We talked about the raw power of the human voice—particularly the power of a cappella singing, the history of The October Project, and how the music of The Book of Rounds creates a journey of release and surrender through the challenges of life. We also listened to four different tracks from the new record by October Project, The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace. Here’s my conversation with October Project:
Welcome, October Project, to Insights at the Edge. To begin with, I wonder if you could each introduce yourself and talk about your contribution as part of October Project.
Julie Flanders: OK, I’ll start. I’m Julie Flanders, and I am the writer for October Project—meaning the lyricist. I work with the words and the energy and the concepts of the band. I’m somewhat the creative muse of the band.
Emil Adler: Hi there. I’m Emil Adler. I’m the composer—and the engineer and a producer. I help make the records as well as music direct when we play out in live venues.
Marina Belica: Hi, I’m Marina Belica. I’m the lead singer. One thing Julie left out from her introduction is that she also sings. We sing in close harmony. In my sort of new venture here with The Book of Rounds, I’m also working in a producing capacity.
TS: Now, the three of you have known each other since you were teenagers. Here you are, still together. You told me that—right now, as we’re talking—you’re gathered around a glass table in New York City. How is it that, a couple decades later, you’re together as friends and performing together? Tell me a little bit about that story.
JF: This is Julie. I met Emil when I was 14 and Marina when I was 17. So, we not only do we hold together a tremendous amount of love, but we also hold together a tremendous amount of history in very specific and ordinary experiences that bind us and bond us together—as well as extraordinary experiences.
I love to think of it as the fact that we are constantly practicing harmony. Fricative moments in harmony are very exciting, and they seek resolution.
So, we live that in our relationship together as friends and also hopefully bring that to and through the music—where we can live in a lot of simplicity with each other, or we learn to tolerate and make something beautiful out of complexity.
TS: Now, were you singing together when you were teenagers? I mean, have you been singing together this whole time?
MB: Julie and I first became friends at Yale, which is where The Book of Rounds was produced and conceived. But, we both came together as freshmen on our first day. It turned out we had both been quite serious about the study of the piano.
So, we began as musicians. I developed—this is Marina speaking—a keener interest in vocal singing at Yale, where I directed an a cappella group. Julie was also always writing songs with Emil along the way. Then, in our senior year, we wound up doing our first evening of music together.
TS: Now, in the mid-1990s, October Project was rather well known for high quality pop music. Tell our listeners a little bit about the journey from creating high-quality pop music to, now, The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace.
JF: Well, it’s really quite an extraordinary journey. I find this project to be one of the most personal and powerful bridges in my life.
So, our group together in the 1990s—as you just mentioned—was somewhat influential because we were bringing spiritually themed and very literary pop with very rich and beautiful arrangements into what ended up being a pretty mainstream audience. We never knew that would happen. We were just making music that we cared about and thought people would care about.
Suddenly, it just lifted off. It had wings. The music industry began its changes and transitions—which are still going on—around that time. Music that was sung by women at that time was not exactly embraced by the marketplace.
So, we ended up touring with Sarah McLachlan. That ended up resulting in a sort of beautiful surge of women supporting each other in music that was called Lilith Fair. And then our label summarily dropped us.
So, we got to experience to experience flying in some elevated air for a while and then boom, landing rather abruptly—which led us into independent music. I think independent music led us to and through the idea that we no longer had to work with the idea of marketing firms. We could work spirit-first again.
So, The Book of Rounds was a bridge of all of our interests. But, for me it’s also bringing together my work as a healer and a spiritual teacher, helping to gather and hold messages that empower them that’s aesthetic and beautiful and easy to receive and joyous to participate in.
Then Emil and Marina each—I’ll let them speak to this out of their elements in ways that are really meaningful to them. So, we also collaborated pretty strongly into the project.
EA: You know, it’s—as Marina already mentioned—the three of us were classically trained. They’re concert-level pianists, Marina and Julie are. I have an advanced degree in music composition.
So, really, the question is: How did we ever make a pop album in the ‘90s—or a couple of them—and have so much—what is the odd transition to The Book of Rounds? The Book of Rounds is more of an expression of who we are or who we began as musically—possibly more so than the pop album was.
So, it’s not that great a shift. It’s certainly the kind of music that I know Marina did when she was at school. She’ll speak to that.
MB: Well, actually, I wanted to suggest—just as Emil was saying—that The Book of Rounds is really very clearly an expression of who we are as a group and who Julie and Emil are as writers. I can say that they have always written music that would soothe the savage beast. The Book of Rounds, now, is written with the very intention of soothing and inducing a meditative and relaxing experience not only for the listener but for the singer as well.
So, I feel like—for me—I can see the easy progression from the kind of music they’ve always written to what these rounds are. And interestingly—because people have asked me—they experience The Book of Rounds when they listen to it, and [they] say it’s not like other meditation music. Part of that is that, in conceiving of how a Western person meditates, these are somewhat ephiphanal or rapturous at times. But, we felt that sometimes music allows a sort of freedom from noise that then points to a deeper silence. Music can be a quiet what’s already there.
So, that’s always been in our work. Just to speak to the pop versus or in concert with Book of Rounds-sort of self-expression, we have another album that we were creating and have been creating at the same time that’s coming out also in 2016, which is called The Ghost of Childhood. That would be our pop album.
When you hear The Book of Rounds and that album side by side, some of the rapturous or meditative elements of transducing energies that might have been destructive into energies that become expressive and conducive to change or transformation are in both albums. [They are] just somewhat differently presented—but sort of similarly conceived and rendered.
TS: Well now, when you talk about “soothing the savage beast,” I think that we need to put this on right away. So, let’s play the first track from The Book of Rounds. It’s a song called “Grace.” This is the first of the 21 Songs of Grace; “Grace” itself.
[“Grace” from The Book of Rounds plays.]
TS: Very beautiful. Wow.
JF: Thank you.
TS: Now, Julie, these songs were originally created for your son. You wrote these for your son when he was going through a difficult time. Can you tell us a little bit about that—the origin of the lyrics?
JF: Yes. Of course, meeting my son now—he’s just such a different person than at the inception of this piece. He had been going through knock-and-tumble New York City public schools. He’s just a really extraordinary person. The rounds occurred because we had had to change schools a few times because there was a lot going on in the situations that he ended up in.
He ended up in this miracle of a school. The first place they put him in after-school programs was in this choir. The choir was a group of children who were in sixth grade together. We went to see him with this little community of children. The teacher had them singing a round. They came out and surrounded the audience with their little voices cascading over one another—my son being accepted and embraced in this group of children who were so loving and kind like he is.
The song that they sang—I just said to my husband—I’d never experienced anything like that. Just the purity and innocence of those voices colliding and cascading into something so beautiful. I said, “I think we should make it our spiritual and creative practice to write rounds that have that kind of innocence and purity and protection and redemption in them.”
That’s how it started. We started writing these songs for Julian for times when he couldn’t be with us, but we could just imagine the embrace of that kind of music and love holding him. Then we realized that that’s something everybody needs and everybody should receive—that kind of lullaby, embrace, protection, forgiveness, unconditional acceptance by other human beings.
TS: Now, tell me a little bit about what a “round” is in music. There’s some type of technical definition of what makes something a round.
EA: Hi there, it’s Emil. They’ve thrown the question to me for some reason.
A round is simply a melody that is capable of harmonizing with itself upon the melody reentering at a certain point. We’ve all sung rounds like “Frere Jacques” and—
MB: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat—”
EA: “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” “Three Blind Mice,” things like that. When we thought of the rounds, Julie and I—singing our songs years ago—we realized we’d never written a round before. We really weren’t aware of rounds that had been written—although, with a little research afterwards, we found out that in fact some songwriters and composers have actually devoted a fair amount of attention and love to writing rounds.
So, not to get too technical about it, but I’ve discovered that there are two types of rounds. There’s a round that is an entire melody—you know, several phrases—and it’s sung in its entirety. Upon its repetition, a counter-melody is then sung. Then, upon the repetition of those two things, a third melody is sung again.
That’s a little different than the “Frere Jacques” kind of rounds, which are basically a single tune wherein the middle of the tune another part begins.
So, in the 21 rounds, there are versions of both types of rounds. The former type is a little more complicated, so it appears in the later chapters as the music gets a little more challenging.
MB: Hi, this is Marina. What I was going to say is, as a singer, what’s so fun about rounds is that everyone gets to be the lead singer. There’s one melody and everyone gets to sing it. That harmony happens by itself, because one person starts and a little bit later another person starts on the same melody. It’s the intersection of those two melodies that creates the harmony.
The third thing that’s so fun about it is that it requires collaboration. A round doesn’t exist without two people participating. It’s sort of like: what is the sound of one hand clapping? A round sung by one person is just a beautiful melody—which, by the way, I can say this since I haven’t written them: Emil has written some absolutely gorgeous melodies, to which Julie has written such inspired lyrics.
But, it does require collaboration. So, rounds kind of invite community and bringing distinctive voices together into resonance. So, from the singers’ standpoint, they’re magical.
TS: Now, let’s say somebody’s listening and they’re thinking, “I want to write a round. I want to write a round right now.” Can you give them some instructions? Just like people [who] like to write [and] learn about haikus. Before you know it, people are writing their own haikus. How would someone go about writing a round?
EA: Well, the best way probably is to take a model—a round you already know—and look at it carefully. Once again, for fear of getting too technical, there are certain intervals in music that sound consonant together and other intervals that are less so. So, if you know a little bit of musical theory, there are some tricks to making rounds sound good when they [are] coinciding with themselves at a certain point.
TS: It doesn’t sound as easy as writing a haiku, I got to say. It’s getting complicated here. It might not be that easy, huh?
MB: They’re deceptive in their simplicity. They are not easy to write.
TS: All right.
JF: They’re easy but hard to write. That’s kind of what it is—it’s almost as if the simplicity—you know how there are calligraphists in Asian languages, and they’ll spend all day creating one glyph or hieroglyphic representation? It’s almost like a Japanese tea ceremony in the creation.
For us as writers, the simplicity and the technicality of it was part of the discipline of the everyday nature of creating the piece.
TS: Now, you’re giving me a greater appreciation of what has gone into each of these 21 songs.
JF: Yes. Each song was a meditation thematically and in terms of intentionality—and then in terms of what it requires technically. It was really like creating a very tiny little service.
I guess a Japanese tea ceremony would be a great analogy, because it appears quite simple. You gather to drink the tea. It’s keeping the awareness into the tea that creates pleasure and delight. Anyone can drink the tea, but the ceremony might require many lifetimes of preparation and gestures and commitments.
MB: So, it’s kind of like there’s a lot of commitment in the round—not only in the music, but in the writing of the lyrics—in her choice of words and the way that they would intersect with other words. The level of detail is so much more than anyone would ever imagine. As she says, it’s like a Japanese tea ceremony—the gestures—the tiny gestures that need to be incorporated are so many.
JF: But, we wanted for the listener—for it to just be pleasurable. So, it’s just like drinking a cup of tea or having something delicious. A lot of effort went into the preparation, but we wanted for it to be received and experienced with ease. It doesn’t require anything to listen except awareness. But, of course, awareness is its own simple complexity.
TS: Now, I know the record is divided into these three different chapters. The first song that we heard, “Grace,” was from the first chapter. You described the rounds in the first chapter as pure simplicity. Then we move to the second chapter, where the next seven rounds are presented. You describe these are “more adventurous.”
So, we’re going to hear something in just a few moments from the second chapter. Tell us what you mean by “more adventurous?” What’s the change from the first chapter to the second chapter?
EA: I think the change is probably best described musically, because it’s really in the harmonic language. In other words, the first set of rounds—as I was explaining before—they have simple relationships to each other. As we move on, they become a little more complex [and] a little more dissonant. We’re playing with notes that rub against each other a little more. We’re playing with time signatures that are unusual.
Those time signatures—and this was a great discovery for me. Just a quick music theory lesson here. We’re used to listening to things that have four beats—or three beats, let’s say, if it’s a waltz. Those things are very common for us to listen to. But, if something has something like five beats or seven beats, you get the sense that either something has been added or something is missing.
So, as a result of that, your analytical brain begins to turn off. You stop waiting for something to happen that you expect will happen and you let go, because it’s not what you expect. So, the analytical part of the brain turns off and you just float in the land of five or the land of seven.
I know it’s a very technical way of explaining it, but that’s what we mean by “a little more adventurous.” I don’t know if it’s true that the lyrics do that as well, but let me throw that to Julie.
JF: Well, when we decided to expand the piece—which, by the way, we decided because of Sounds True. We were trying to give a more substantial experience that would be sort of each song [as] a meditation, then the piece as whole [is] more of an extended experience for people.
One of the things we thought about is that—though we were exploring and offering innocence—we were also not wanting to do a kind of spiritual bypass. We were trying to keep some of the darker threads of what people actually have to go through [in the] present.
So, some of that had to do with: what do you do when you hit shadow or shadows in your life? What if there’s a crisis? What if there’s a loss?
We were threading that through lyrically and musically. If you think about grace as being almost like the Fool card in the Tarot—of being able to start again at any moment—we wanted that to anchor and hold the rest of the piece. We mean every piece and every song—every round is a moment to start over. But, each with a particular aspect of human experience.
So, as those experiences grow and resonate, we thought they should culminate in perhaps surrender at the end of the piece. You know—where we accept everything about ourselves and are ready for that experience, which then leads back to grace.
But, in the middle, there’s some complexities. They have to do with loss. They have to do with shadow. They have to do with what we move through and go through and yearn for, and find difficult to live without.
TS: I’d love our listeners to hear a track from this more adventurous second chapter. What do you suggest we hear?
MB: Well—it’s Marina. Emil was speaking about the wonder of living in the land of five. So, what we’ve chosen from chapter two is a song called “Meadow,” which lives in that land.
[“Meadow” from The Book of Rounds plays.]
TS: Again, total wow. That was so beautiful!
[Emil, Julie, and Marina laugh.]
TS: I could feel—I think—a little bit of what you meant by more complexity and “some of the darkness” as well. I’m curious about that in terms of harmony and creating harmony through these rounds—but also that edge, if you will, of something that feels dissonant and then gets dissolved into harmony. How [does] that all [work] for you?
MB: Well, what’s interesting about these rounds is they were written as single-line melodies that could be sung quite simply in the manner we were describing before—just two voices singing with each other. But, along the way, we developed them into something quite sophisticated, such as what you just heard—which is “Meadow.” That was arranged by Keiji Ishiguri. He’s a very talented arranger [and] also a Yale alumnus.
What Julie was saying before—one of the aspects of harmony is that it can be fricative or it can be consonant. I think you find both of these qualities in this particular arrangement.
TS: Now, this “fricative”—that’s interesting. That’s not a word that’s part of my vocabulary. Is that a musical term?
JF: Well, it’s kind of like the thing of two sticks rubbing together to make a spark. It’s like the friction of things rubbing until something extraordinary happens.
I think that’s a lot of what life is. We rub up against life. Sometimes, it isn’t comfortable. But often, our greatest learning—our greatest experience—comes from situations that have pain in them or loss in them.
We are timeless beings in a very temporal form. So, a lot of this piece is about what time does to us—what loss does to us. This constant and long goodbye that we are engaged in—and to keep joy through it, to keep optimism, and to start over again the next day. Or the next minute, the next second.
The piece is an invitation to stay in life and not to retract from it—but to raise your voice, to open your throat, to breathe, and make sound. That’s kind of it.
Through that sound—I mean, sound and silence are both such a deep expression of the universe. It is the contraction of the universe. If we are vibrational and the universe is the pluck of a string or its vibrational reality—and a silence—they come in as twins. It’s the first duality.
MB: You know—it’s Marina. To that, I’ll add I’ve been reading—at Julie’s suggestion; she bought it as a gift for my daughter—The Chronicles of Narnia. In the first book, C.S. Lewis describes the creation of the world through the main character of Aslan as the world is sung into being.
I find it one of the most beautiful passages I have ever read in any literature anywhere. That made perfect sense to me.
TS: It was also beautiful how, in that piece “Meadow,” there were those moments—those beats, if you will—of silence. Those pauses. I thought that was tremendous.
JF: Yes. When you realize that, in the first two chapters, you are hearing nothing but human voices—the only instrument is breath and sound and soul—we sometimes get blown away. We forget—even in our own listening to the piece—that there’s nothing there but human beings. In the third chapter, we add a piano. But up until then, you’re just hearing people colliding with each other and making a beautiful noise. We find it extraordinary.
MB: Rounds lend themselves to a cappella singing. If you think of all the classic rounds, people just gather around a dinner table or start singing. They’re a perfect vehicle to be rendered simply by the human voice.
TS: Now, you decided to record The Book of Rounds at Yale University. You went back to Yale and worked with musical voices of Yale University students. Is that correct?
MB: Yes, it is.
JF: Yes. One of the things that we realized was that we—music in the marketplace is often only marketed to people by way of their age. We feel that it moves across a generation and includes all of us—that we wanted to create a piece that included people who were young and people who could bring in their full gift while being mentored.
So, that was sort of the intentionality of that—to have an intergenerational musical expression.
TS: Now, of course, I’m imagining—when I think of people singing The Book of Rounds and the recording project—that you’re somehow in a circle itself—that the singers are in a circle. Is that true? Is there some kind of circle happening here?
MB: Well, you’re so astute Tami.
JF: You are!
MB: We’ve been actually in conversation with several very esteemed choirs. One of the things we’ve been talking about the most is how it would be best rendered if the choir could surround the audience—because it is a circle. The experience of being surrounded by that experience and the sound is something very much suggested by the music.
I can say that in the recording of it, it was not quite as poetic as that. But, the idea of singing it in a circle is absolutely the way we hoped for and intended in live performance.
JF: Yes. I mean, we really built circles into every aspect—and intertwining circles. You take two circles and you put them together, [and] you get an infinity symbol.
Emil came up with the most beautiful idea, which is imagining everyone in a planetarium, looking back and up to a skylight of cosmic beauty while hearing that circle of sound around them. We thought that would be our ultimate venue—just everyone in this, looking up to the stars while being surrounded by singers and just hearing the voices, whether it were in Red Rocks or it were enclosed in the New York City Planetarium. That’s kind of our idea.
TS: Now, you mentioned something that I really picked up on, which is how The Book of Rounds takes us through time and loss, and helps us to connect to the joy that can be there underneath it all. I want to play one of the tracks from The Book of Rounds that’s part of the third chapter—what you call “the actively engaging part” of The Book of Rounds. It’s a song that’s called “Joy.”
But, I wonder—before we listen to it—if you can say a little bit more about that idea—how we can stay connected to joy even when our hearts are breaking, perhaps, with whatever might be happening in our life.
JF: Yes. In fact, maybe even especially when our hearts are breaking. I’ve always felt that grief and joy—those are somewhat extremes of human capacity to feel. They’re so deeply connected.
I remember once meeting a woman. I think she paid me a great compliment, because she said to me after a few moments, “Oh, I could never go to a funeral with you. We would just crack up.”
I thought that was the strangest thing in the world, but she herself had gone through a great deal of grief in her life. She realized that laughter was the antidote—that it was the greatest salve.
For joy—joy is really about not having to have a reason to be joyful. [It’s about] not having to have it match a circumstance, but having it just be the natural state we arrive in and we depart in and we cavort in.
I actually wrote that for Marina’s children. She has nine-year-old twins who are just—one of her children is a great gymnast and can do flips in the air. The other’s a great singer and being, Serena. For the two of them, I just thought they are creatures of amazing happiness and amazing activity. I thought, “What would a child love to hear? What would a child enjoy?” Slapping their hands together, making noise—doing all the things they’re forbidden to do in school, and just having a hullaballoo.
I felt that was a great reminder for adults too. There’s just something about the clapping and the snapping and clicking noises which the body can make.
Marina, do you have anything to say to that? You’re a very joyful creature too.
MB: Oh, well, no. With the clapping and the snapping and the stomping—isn’t there an African language that’s spoken this way? [Laughs.]
JF: Yes, the clicking language. We would have recorded it in that if we had spoken it fluently.
[Marina laughs.]
JF: I even have to say that, as we are here, for some reason my dog—who’s like 12 years old—has suddenly decided to turn into a puppy. She keeps carrying her toy through the room as we do this interview, and keeps trying to let us know how joyful she is despite the fact that we’re doing this metaphysical interview. She is bringing her big, joyful self—her big, puppy teddy bear—into the room and saying, “Look at me!”
TS: All right. Let’s hear the song, “Joy,” from The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace from October Project.
[“Joy” from The Book of Rounds plays.]
TS: I have to say: you’ve lifted my spirits. It’s not that easy to do, and you did it.
Now, tell me where you get the name “October Project?” Where does that come from?
EA: “The October Project.” We love the feeling of that—the idea of “October” and its transitional state, and “Project,” which is a kind of organized thing. It’s like the title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It’s got these two facets in it that’s sort of reflected who at the time we thought we were. It’s somewhat romantic, and yet little organized, A-plus students.
[Emil, Julie, and Marie laugh.]
TS: Now, this broadcast is happening during the holiday season. It seems that there’s something about listening to choral music [and] a cappella music during the holidays. I’m curious what your thoughts are about that. What happens during the holidays—during these dark days—when we seem to be drawn to vocal music in a special kind of way?
JF: Oh, you’re right with us on that thought. There is obviously a great tradition of singing during these upcoming holidays especially. We felt that these rounds are actually a kind of sacred, secular music that works perfectly in concert with the kinds of music that are played at this time of year.
So, I think there’s something to be found for almost anyone. From Thanksgiving on forward, really, it’s for any gathering of people in community. It can be used as something that’s just in the background and complementing the environment—or something that you can listen to actively and help put you in the place where you are really inspired to be in communion with people.
MB: Or if your family’s coming over and you really need to chill out before they get there, you can put it in while you clean the house. So, you’ll be in a good mood for them. It’s sort of an intoxicant with no side effects.
But also, when you say that, I really think toward the time between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. There’s just something about this that has to do with going into and then emerging from winter. There’s just an acceptance of being in that deeper place. I think when you said that, I kind of thought—because we’re East Coast people, so there’s cold here. I know that in other parts of the country, they never really go through that. But for us, we’re very seasonal.
[There’s] just that sense of being around a fire and forming a circle of voices against the darkness, against the cold. This is a piece that does that—and then emerges again into joy.
TS: Now, Julie, in your introduction—when you were first talking about yourself—you mentioned that you work as a healer and a teacher as well as being a musician. I know—in reading about The Book of Rounds and its genesis—that part of what informed the writing of the lyrics and the whole creation of The Book of Rounds was the idea of bringing something that you call “positive trance states” to the creation of the music.
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that—what you mean by “positive trance states.”
JF: Well, you know, my training [has] a great deal of hypnosis and altering brain waves so that a person can learn a new way of being that is better for them—kinder, gentler, more in keeping with their values or their creativity.
So, when we were conceiving the rounds, there’s several areas I’m trained in. One would be energy work. Another would be language. Language does have sense, but a lot of times in hypnosis, it’s the nonsense that makes more sense and really allows us to travel into the places of the mind and spirit of being where we align with ourselves.
So, I’m very interested in mantra and sound meditation, and how that interfaces with silent meditation. I was trying to weave together those elements through my lyrics and musicianship so that—if you were really to think of them as simply suggestions for healing—they’re meant to do that in the word and the energy and the circles of language.
Circles of language are generally a wonderful way to create a trance. By “a positive trance,” I mean one that leads toward a healing of the human spirit, an embrace of the human spirit, and an embrace of human nature without leaving anything out in the cold. There’s no part of us that gets abandoned or neglected or rejected. It’s saying, “Welcome home. You’re safe here.”
TS: Now, we started in listening to tracks from The Book of Rounds by hearing the very first track from the record, “Grace.” Then we listened to two other tracks. I want to end by hearing the last track from the record, which is a song called “Ready.”
But, before we do, I’d love to hear: if you were to describe the whole journey of the record—the journey through the 21 songs—how [would] you each might describe your experience of the journey through The Book of Rounds?
JF: Well, maybe because in some ways I’ve had to hold the origin point and the completion point of that in a conscious way, I tried to hold the piece consciously and also to allow rather than force or direct the piece—to allow it to move through the way it wanted to.
So, we wrote the piece before we put it in an order. We decided that the real journey of healing—in our experience, being people that aren’t necessarily at the beginning of life anymore—that probably the most important tool we could offer a young person—a person in pain or distress or suffering—would be to begin with self-forgiveness. [It was] to carry that tool so that every other thing you did or thought or felt would be held in an embrace of unconditionality.
So, we start with grace—which might not be where everyone would start. But, we thought that the ability to start over would be a wonderful superpower. Then we moved through different occasions where we thought soothing or comforting or support or enjoyment or delight would be the antidotes to specific experiences that people might be challenged by.
Along with grace—as we moved through joy—I believe that surrender or the place we arrive where we can accept that there are mysteries greater than ourselves—we come from a lineage of many people before us [and] many people after, and perhaps a cosmos that is just so much greater than the human experience—that we wanted to acknowledge a higher power. So, it’s sort of like, with self-forgiveness and a higher power—we felt those would be a compass from here to there in a lifetime.
TS: Let’s hear the final song from The Book of Rounds—a song called “Ready.”
[“Ready” from The Book of Rounds plays.]
TS: This song, “Ready,” from The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace, by October Project.
I have to say: I love the name “October Project,” for the music of The Book of Rounds. Somehow, I feel the quality of that depth of transformation—of the change in the season—and the beauty and fullness and letting go. I think it’s a perfect name for what you’re up to.
EA: Thank you.
JF: Thank you.
MB: Thank you.
TS: As we conclude, I wonder if you would each just share what your real, heartfelt wish is for the listener of The Book of Rounds. How do you hope people will benefit or experience listening to the record?
EA: There is a journey in this record. It’s an hour of music, and I just hope that people would commit to it in the way that I remember doing when I was younger and you bought a new album from a cherished band or a composer. You’d put the lights out and put the sound up, and just listened from beginning to end without distraction.
I think the greatest thing for me would be to imagine that somebody, somewhere would be like the young Emil and do something like that.
MB: This is Marina. You know—for me, one of the great pleasures of this recording is that it’s primarily a cappella, which is not an experience that many people have had. I’ve spoken to a few people and, for me, it’s very common. But, I think it’s an uncommon experience. I think that the joy and the unique experience of hearing—as Julie said before—only voices coming together in such a complex architecture—around the theme of something so soulful—is unparalleled. There is nothing like that communication of an utterance of voices carrying that sort of message.
So, I hope that people experience that pleasure to the same degree that I do.
JF: If there’s one thread that carries through all of it, it would be the kind of love that everybody wants to feel. They want to give it and they want to receive it. It’s just that a deep, deep instinct to love—that this piece would make a person feel that someone understands and someone feels with their pain. Someone would still hold them and say, “You’re OK. It’s going to be OK.”
I think that kind of love—the kind of love that says, “You know what? You’re OK,”—like a mother’s love. That kind of love.
TS: Emil Adler, Marina Belica, and Julie Flanders—the members of October Project. We’ve been hearing several tracks from their new record, The Book of Rounds: 21 Songs of Grace. Thank you so much for being with us on Insights at the Edge. Thank you for the gift of The Book of Rounds.
JF: Thank you, Tami.
MB: Thank you very much.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
