For better or verse as songwriters put poems to music

KANE YOUNG: Frente frontwoman Angie Hart will help put poetry in motion as part of Dark Mofo.

Frente frontwoman Angie Hart has set two poems to music as part of the Borrowed Verse project. Picture: Ellen Smith

WHEN Frente frontwoman Angie Hart was invited to set two poems to music as part of the Borrowed Verse project, she knew exactly what she needed to do.

Borrowed Verse sees a collective of acclaimed Australian and New Zealand songwriters lift poems from the pages of books and bring them to life in song, giving new context to words written by everyone from staples of Australian poetry such as Kenneth Slessor and Judith Wright to living legends like Uncle Herb Wharton and outsiders like Michael Dransfield.

Hart — whose ARIA Award-winning indie-pop band Frente found fame in the 1990s with hits such as Ordinary Angels, Accidentally Kelly Street and Bizarre Love Triangle — turned straight to Dorothy Porter’s posthumous book The Bee Hut, which was published after the acclaimed Melbourne poet’s death from breast cancer in 2008.

“I had been given The Bee Hut book when I lost a friend to breast cancer,” Hart told Pulse this week.

“It was the perfect book to receive, although it took me a long time to even want to open it. I have quite an emotional attachment to it, so when the Borrowed Verse project came up I knew exactly [which poet] I wanted to have a shot at.”

Hart selected two poems from the book — The Bee Hut and Not The Same — and set them to music for the Borrowed Verse album, which was released last week.

“Not The Same was probably more clear to me, and The Bee Hut the song came afterwards,” she explained.

“Not The Same is poignant and sombre, and it embraces a very difficult time. It seems to me to be directly about breast cancer, which is what I wanted to be reading at the time.”

The Borrowed Verse album also features contributions from the likes of Glenn Richards (Dransfield’s A Strange Bird) and his band Augie March (Slessor’s Mephistopheles Perverted), Ben Salter (Wharton’s Tracks and Richard Garnett’s Where Corals Lie), and Tinpan Orange’s Emily Lubitz (Oscar Schwartz’s Today You Asked Me If I Remember What You Told Me About Love).

There are also adaptations by Tom Cooney (Pascalle Burton’s Morbid Fascination), Paul Bonetti (Dransfield’s Midwinter), The Stress of Leisure (David Stavanger’s Straws), Jessie L. Warren (Maria Zajkowski’s Dear John), and Nausicaa (Wright’s Silence).

Frente frontwoman Angie Hart has set two poems to music as part of the Borrowed Verse project. Picture: Ellen Smith

While she admits to being “not a well-read poetry fan”, Hart jumped at the chance to

be part of Borrowed Verse when approached by the project’s producer, Brisbane musician and literature student Simon Munro.

“It just seemed like the kind of project that I would like to do — definitely a love project,” she said.

“I’ve got a three-and-a-half-year-old, and I’ve been really trying to be more discerning with what I do and don’t do with my time. This one has been so rewarding and fed back into my music a lot.

“I worked on piano — and I’m not really a piano player — so it probably took me two or three times longer than it would take a person who knows how to play piano.

“So it was also a really great project in that way, because I got to up my skills and start to harness a new sound for myself, which I’ve really been wanting to do — a new approach.”

The nature of the Borrowed Verse project meant Hart couldn’t rely on her regular process and forced her out of her songwriting comfort zone.

“Using somebody else’s words — Dorothy Parker’s words — really changed the way that I sat down and decided to do a song,” she said.

“Having someone else already have done the job just turned everything on its head.

“The meter was set, and it was about fitting the song around the feel and the meter the poem had given me.

“It’s like being given a wonderful, inspirational writing project.”

Hart, Salter, Lubitz, Nausicaa, Stavanger (aka Ghostboy), New Zealand indie-folk act Tiny Ruins, North Queensland Aboriginal novelist and poet Graham Akhurst, and Melbourne-based musician and composer Sophie Koh will officially launch the album in Hobart tomorrow night, with a live concert as part of Dark Mofo.

And Hart — who was last in Tasmania to perform with Frente during last winter’s Festival of Voices — believes that you won’t necessarily have to be a poetry buff to get something out of the show.

“I think that’s the magic of what Simon dreamt up, that it is making poetry more accessible for people who might find it difficult to get into poems,” she said.

“Bringing poems to contemporary songs is definitely a way to help people absorb them.”

Dark Mofo presents Borrowed Verse at the Avalon Theatre in Melville St from 7pm tomorrow.

Tickets are $39 (plus booking fee), go to www.darkmofo.net.au for bookings.