Artists
Biography
4AD is excited to release Dark Was The Night on February 17th, 2009. Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National produced the album, and John Carlin, the founder of the Red Hot Organization was the executive producer.
No one tells the story of how this project came about better than Aaron Dessner....
Dark Was The Night began three years ago with a casual conversation between myself and John Carlin, who started both Red Hot and Funny Garbage, a digital company in New York, where we both worked. I was leaving to tour full-time with my band the National and pursue other musical endeavors with my brother Bryce. While expressing his support, John suggested that we should make a Red Hot record together some day.
The National toured the world in a van in 2005 and 2006 and we found ourselves, along with many of the artists on this record, in the middle of an exploding independent music scene in Brooklyn and across the US, Canada, the UK and Europe. During this tour, and subsequent ones over the last three years, Bryce and I began little by little to collect the songs that would make up this compilation. We all agreed not to do a “theme” album per se; but something that showcased the best in independent music, with an emphasis on traditional themes played and arranged in a contemporary way. Very early in the process, John shared a rough collection of American roots music for inspiration-- depression-era blues, country and gospel including "Dark was the Night" by the Delta bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, which would become a kind of theme song for us as we found our way. And it was not until a recent conversation between Bryce and David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, who shares our obsession with the song and had an arrangement for it, that we came full circle and ended our journey right where we had begun by naming the record Dark was the Night.
As we invited friends and peers to contribute, our collective social awareness became apparent: anyone that had the time was willing to donate their time and their music to the Red Hot cause. But there were many different stories behind each song: some we had heard live and knew had to be on the record (The Books "Cello Song", My Brightest Diamond’s "Feelin Good"); close friends whose arms we knew we could twist enough to give us special tracks (Arcade Fire, and Sufjan Stevens); bands we asked who were too busy but had solo projects or side projects they could include (Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio and Jonsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros); songs we had always imagined certain artists singing (Cat Power’s "Amazing Grace" and Antony’s "I WasYoung When I Left Home"); and dream collaborations (David Byrne and The Dirty Projectors, Feist with Grizzly Bear and Ben Gibbard, and my own song with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver).
In the end, there was enough great music to produce two discs--one dark and homegrown with almost classical arrangements of folk themes; the other more bright and evocative of the best of independent rock music at the beginning of the 21st century. "Dark Was The Night" and the Dore illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost, which make up the art imagery in this booklet, evoke a "fallen" world of struggle, but also the capacity of art to inspire us to rise above the obstacles put in our path. Our nights may be dark, but music gives us inspiration and hope of brighter days to come.