Psalm 23

April 13th 2020: A new recording

The fog of my own COVID illness finally started to clear in early April. I knew it was dissipating because I finally found myself wanting to write music again.

At the same time, people from my synagogue were dying. On one occasion I attended a joint Zoom shiva for two men who had died on the same day. My heart broke to see Ethel, the husband of one of them, sitting there, entirely on her own, in the flat where her husband had passed away, still suffering from the illness which had killed him. I felt utterly helpless. We all did. We couldn't be there in person. It was just horrifying.. 

Ethel and her husband Judah were both huge fans of our synagogue choir and I instinctively knew that I needed to write something which had a chance of bringing just a modicum of hope or comfort to the scores of people who were suffering. 

I wrote to our rabbi and asked him which of the psalms he felt had a message which might best speak to people who were frightened or grieving and he immediately suggested Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd. After reading the words I knew not just that I wanted to set it to music, but furthermore that I needed to step up to the plate and sing it myself. I am usually rather happy hiding in the background when it comes to performing. I like being part of a choir primarily because, whilst I love making music, I’ve always suffered crippling embarrassment and nerves when asked to perform anything solo. I have the typical voice of a director in my head at all times which says, "what DO you look and sound like?!"

The piece wrote itself in minutes. I have seldom had such an immediate musical response to words. Obviously, setting Hebrew text brings its own set of challenges. I had to run everything past Michael to make sure I was stressing all the correct syllables. Scantion is something I’m fanatical about. Nathan, who is even more fanatical about it than me, taught me well!

I asked Julian Simmons if he would produce the track for me. We decided that I could send him midi files of all the different instrumental parts and trust him to make sensible choices in terms of the pads and samples he used. We've been working together since 2002, so I knew that everything could be done remotely in this manner. We wouldn’t need to sit in a studio together, even though that's the way we'd always worked before.

I asked Fiona to add some violin, and she recorded herself playing in her front room in her house in a village just outside Glasgow. I loved that we were making music like this. It somehow felt like we were beating the virus. My body had beaten the virus and now creativity was beating it as well.

The track the three of us created felt epic and emotional and all that remained was for me to record the vocals. I do not have a good enough microphone at my house, so, after much discussion, we decided it would be okay for me to go to Julian’s house in Crouch End to record it. As long as we were never in the same room and could be linked-up via headphones, it felt like we weren’t being foolish, or breaking too many lockdown rules. 

So, in the middle of Passover, on Easter Monday, in fact, I drove through the entirely empty streets of North London from Finchley to Crouch End. The weather was incredible. Spring really did suddenly rush in this year. I pulled up outside Julian’s house, texted to say I was there, and the front door was opened for me. My instructions were to head up the stairs, and go into a room where a mic had been set up with a music stand and a pair of headphones which I put on. I took a kippa out of my pocket, placed it on my head, and then heard Julian’s deeply familiar and hugely friendly voice in my ear. It really was a wonderful moment. Julian's wife, Carla, is a vicar, so we were actually recording the piece in a rectory! I don't know why this felt quite so right. It was Passover, but it was also Easter and Psalm 23, of course, has as much resonance with Christians as it does with Jewish people, so, I reckon I was in exactly the right place. 

“Shall we do this?” Julian said. And for the next hour, I sang my heart out. I thought about Ethel and Judah most of all. I remember looking out through the window into Julian and Carla's garden, seeing the sun and the lime green buds bursting on the trees, and, for the first time in I don’t know how long, feeling a sense of optimism. I sang well. The notes sailed out with great ease. And, before I knew it, everything was in the can.

I stood on the street by my car, and Julian and Carla brought their son, Yuvi to the front door for me to meet for the first time. We chatted for five minutes, standing maybe ten meters apart, I blew kisses, got back in my car and drove home, feeling very happy, and incredibly hungry.

The photograph below shows the transliterated Hebrew words to the psalm, with all my marks indicating where the stresses needed to fall, alongside literal English translations of the words. I really did my homework! 

And if you'd like to hear the piece again (or for the first time), please click here