Character and Themes of The Songs
Owing to Stuart Murdoch's authorship and the accompaniment of the group Belle & Sebastian, the songs from the project God Help the Girl much resemble in their musical aspect the other work of Stuart Murdoch and Belle & Sebastian band. These similarities are all the more visible that some of the songs (Funny Little Frog, Act of the Apostle) were taken directly from the band's repertory and were performed earlier by Murdoch himself. In the project God Help the Girl, however, the band limited itself to the accompaniment, the main roles are played by the vocalist – Catherine Ireton and others; which means that the released singles and albums cannot be regarded, strictly speaking, as part of the output of Belle & Sebastian.
The invitation of female vocalists to take part in the project resulted from the subject matter of the songs and the planned film: their main character is a girl named Eve (who is to be played by Catherine Ireton), who dropped out of college (where she was not a very good student), starts work, but wants to change her life – she would like to become a singer or a songwriter. She also has many love and other personal problems – she has just absconded from the psychiatric ward. The problems, however, do not look dramatic in the songs in the form as they were written by Murdoch and are performed by the vocalists. Most of the pieces are cheerful in tone, with elements of irony and self-irony; even the more reflective songs, like Come Monday Night, have a cheerful and catchy tune. In the musical aspect, God Help the Girl is a reference to, or even pastiche of British girl bands performing in the 1960s, with a rich orchestral arrangement.
Read more about this topic: God Help The Girl
Famous quotes containing the words character and, character, themes and/or songs:
“It is true enough, Cambridge college is really beginning to wake up and redeem its character and overtake the age.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When I think of some of the Persians, the Hindus, the Arabs I knew, when I think of the character they revealed, their grace, their tenderness, their intelligence, their holiness, I spit on the white conquerors of the world, the degenerate British, the pigheaded Germans, the smug self-satisfied French.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)