Bill Frisell: Sign of Life

I was noodling around YouTube recently looking at various interview segments related to Bill Frisell and Nels Cline. I posted recently about something found related to Nels, but stumbled across an interesting interview with Bill Frisell as part of the release of his 2011 release Sign of Life (see video below). Perhaps, no surprise, I am forever fascinated by the process that artists go through to create what they create. Maybe that’s why I enjoy direct interviews with artists. What is illuminating about this particular video is that Bill shares, briefly, what he did to write/compose the songs for this particular album. Jump to 7:03 in the video if it does not start their auto-magically. Essentially, prior to the recording date, Bill spent a month in what, to my ear, sounds like a music-based monastic lifestyle in northern Vermont--a man, a room, and musical thoughts, a solo-alchemy, if you will, of fundamental and basic things to create focus in an effort to honestly produce a body of music to share. Again, fascinating window into the creative life of an exceptional artist. Keep watching from that point on to hear his fellow musicians, and collaborators in the truest sense, have to say about playing and recording with Bill--working from a rather skeletal framework, not always knowing where they are to go, or where they are going, and expanding/improvising from the sparse and open-ended sheet music that represents the core that they build their songs from. Great stuff.

Bill Frisell, Sign of Life

Two tracks that perhaps epitomize the simple yet gorgeously effective compositional style featured across the album are “Wonderland” and “It’s a Long Story, Part 2.” They are successive tracks, blending well together. If you enjoy this album, you can listen to previews and/or purchase it here and here.