Two Oscar-nominated songwriters on “Like a Bird” from Sing Sing
Plus, two prison-themed playlists
This weekend, I’ll be watching the Oscars for one category only: Best Original Song. I’ll be rooting for Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada, two Texas songwriters behind “Like a Bird” from Sing Sing, a quietly inspiring movie that you should see if you can. Not only is the song worthy of the prize, the duo could not have been more gracious and thoughtful in talking with me about their process for a newly-published piece in Texas Monthly. You can read it here.
Best Original Song is a wild category. Winners include Bob Dylan and Billie Eilish (twice!), Eminem and Johnny Mercer (four times!), “Let It Go” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “White Christmas” and “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.” Diane Warren has been nominated 16 times, including this year, and never won. Giorgio Moroder has been nominated twice and never lost.
In 1997, Elliott Smith performed “Miss Misery” in a crisp white suit, then lost to “My Heart Will Go On.” Bjork wore her iconic swan dress three years later, then lost to “Things Have Changed,” which — like a lot of winners — plays over the credits of Wonder Boys, and doesn’t really have much to do with the movie. (Great song, though.)
Which brings us back to “Like a Bird.” I’ll confess I haven’t seen the competing movies. But I’m hard-pressed to think of a film1 that makes better use of a song on a cinematic and emotional level. To put it another way: It’s tough to imagine the song without the movie — but it’s almost impossible to imagine the movie without the song, and that’s a rare thing indeed.
And so: Prison. It turns out there are a lot of songs about being behind bars, roughly half of which are performed by Johnny Cash. (Who famously spent but one night in jail2.) Merle Haggard seems to have written another few dozen songs about his time in San Quentin, where he famously saw The Man in Black perform. But I did manage to find a few others.
There are, I’d say, two, maybe three types of prison songs. The first are purely ironic, or at least obviously fanciful — “Jailhouse Rock” and all that. Great songs, to be clear, but more playful than I’d imagine your standard jailhouse experience typically to be.3
The second type of song is non-fictional, sometimes autobiographical. “Mama Tried” is the template; “I Shall Be Released” maybe the most poetic. (Especially as performed by Nina Simone, whose delivery of the line “So I remember every face of every man who put me here” contains multitudes.) They’re mournful, rueful, contrite, occasionally defiant. They bear scars. You hear a lot of prison songs in blues and bluegrass, ideal forms for the plaintive prisoner’s lament.
The third category is songs performed by the incarcerated. There are a lot of field recordings from fifty to a hundred years ago of prisoners in the South singing songs while doing forced labor. They’re haunting, especially if you know anything about the conditions they were enduring.
What does it mean to listen to these songs now? Do we gain a sense of empathy or understanding from hearing their anguished voices? Or does deriving pleasure from them — they are, after all, powerful pieces of music — turn us into voyeurs? I’m not sure, and I’ve only included one example here. Let me know what you think.
Naturally, it all kicks off with “Like a Bird.” The film Sing Sing, based on an excellent Esquire article from a couple decades ago, chronicles the work of an organization called Rehabilitation Through the Arts. You can learn more or support the organization here, if you’re so inclined.
And now to the playlist. I hope you’ll put this on before your Oscar party, or while doing anything else but watching Hollywood’s annual rite of self-love. Your call. I mostly hope you get to listen to this on the outside.
Bonus for paid subscribers: A prison-themed playlist of songs performed live, which captures their energy, agony and even humor, perhaps better than the studio versions. (Don’t tell the unpaid subscribers.)
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