http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx The Elsie Dee Project is please to present the fifth (5th) installment of original Canadian World Beat Music. The Elsie Dee Project is dedicated not only to the diffusion of poetry, but also to the exploration of the musical formulas which one could call the 'lowest common denominator'. Copyright 2011 Pierre Voyer and Boyd Williams SOCAN http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/images/Arthur_Michault.jpg http://www.elsiedeeproject.com/Default.aspx en Song 41 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Osito Rey. No one knows for sure who is Oscar Guillermo Reis Ortega, better known as Osito Rey, the prince of slam in Central America. He tells so many different stories about his origins and his whereabouts - how he was abandoned as a child and how he came by, always in a very unusual way. He was introduced to us by Dwight Edwards and Arthur Michaud who both worked with him on the literary project 100 sonnets 1000 loves of the group ION. In La primera razón, he declares his love to his country of adoption, Costa Rica. Song 42 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Fernando Pessoa. It is impossible to verify if this very popular text is really by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). First of all, the style and content have nothing in common with the works of the famous Portuguese poet, but then again he left an incredible amount of unpublished material, signed by no less than 17 heteronyms. The fact is: the message it conveys could not be simpler and clearer. And since we wanted to thank our many Brazilian fans by recording a song in their language, it fit the bill perfectly. Song 43 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Osito Rey Osito Rey gave us this poem, first published under the title Bimbo mi cielo and signed by his early pseudonym Izi Laidel. And we turned it into our most happy sounding song. It is about his love for a motorcycle queen from Puntarenas. By the sound of it, they were riding together across the Milky Way. Song 44 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jean Cocteau. Jean Cocteau is one of those artists whose name is far better known as their work. As he lived many great artists Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, he was friends with of the time: Picasso, Satie, Stravinsky, Proust, etc. He was a poet, graphic artist, musician and one of the most influential film maker of that era. His poetry mixes sharp modernism with elegant neoclassicism. He was one of the first to use the airplane and motorcycle as poetic themes. One of his last poems says: "Sometimes at night, the lost traveler sees a good light, and runs, his heart filled with joy, towards the ogre's house". Le Train musical is all about statues in a park murdering people...Typical Cocteau! Even though he was never a member of the Surrealist group led by André Breton, his poetry was always what Surrealism was about. Song 45 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Dwight E. Edwards. Once again D.E.Edwards builds a metaphorical conceit in which erotic and esoteric twists are easily confused. Is it an ode to the free life in wilderness or a hymn to self sacrifice in the green war? In this song, the Elsie Dee Project comes through as a singing duet, and that6 certainly opens a door to a whole lot of musical possibilities. Song 46 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Lewis Carroll. For the third time the Elsie Dee Project has fallen for the absolute charm of Lewis Carroll. This time, we used part of a poem taken from his Phantasmagoria. It is a kind of humoristic ars poetica, as light sounding as it is deep and «heavy» in content. As one the main nonsensical poets, Lewis Carroll gives us here the secret of endless meaning. Some twenty years after his death, the French surrealists started playing literary games using the same method of writing not to convey conventional meaning but to create new meanings, as did the Socrates for Victorian nerdy girls. And so did some of the poets of the OULIPO workshop (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle). Song 47 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Arthur Michault. Arthur Michault writes modern poetry with old words. He has made a constant use of folklore and medieval material. This was the first song we recorded with our new sound - so to speak - it has a reggae feel to it. The title is a word game referring to two popular expressions in French: rond de chien (the kind of circle a dog makes when sleeping) and chien de fusil (the handle of a rifle). Song 48 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Charles Baudelaire. This sonnet is one of the most famous poems in French. Charles Baudelaire was a romantic dandy, translator of Edgar A. Poe and Thomas de Quincey, but he was also a hard worker and he kept rewriting his poems until they reached gold sounding perfection. His verses have the highest technical quality imaginable. It is about the albatross. How clumsy it is when out of its natural comfort zone, his majestic flight! How cruel are the sailors with the poor bird, torturing him on the deck! But the poet knows that being like the albatross he has his place in the sky. Song 49 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Jack T. Hammer. Jack T Hammer has always been on the edge of something or another. He had given us Freeze last year, now he is more ambiguous, but still pushes the limits of civility and outrageousness. Some members of ION (a group of artists) have told us that they had a hard time pondering his natural 1his forgotten romantic soul. In Homecoming he manages to walk a straight line - so to speak - while adventuring out of his comfort zone. Song 50 - Music by the Elsie Dee Project. Lyrics by Vicente Aleixandre. In Spain, what is called the generation of 27 has given us Federico Garcia Lorca and Rafael Alberti (our song Invitación al Aire) and Vicente Aleixandre (1898-1984). First Surrealist, he later moved away from dream and created a very simple poetic language in order to express more accurately the life or everyday people. His poetry kept its highly elegant style, but it opened up to the universality of sensuality. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1977.