#Koortjes - Parquet Courts - Death Will Bring Change (2018)

daFestival

Een eigenwijze keuze aan songs met koortjes is wat we u deze week voorschotelen.

Eén van onze favoriete groepjes hedentendage, Parquet Courts ,en ook eigenaars van een song met een stemmig koortje. Een kinderkoor van de Upper East Side in New York.

De koorzang werd toegevoegd, toen de song reeds helemaal was opgenomen. Waarom ze in extremis toch nog een kinderkoor toevoegden verklaart Austin Brown van Parquet Courts: “I was twenty years old when I lost my sixteen-year-old sister in a school bus accident. It's not about the death so much as how it affects – how it changes your personality; how it changes your life. Death is tragic and then the people who are left to deal with it, with grief, who are still around, have to deal with the emotional effect – that's what the song is about."

Hij dacht dat de samenzang van kinderen nog een donkere gevoeligheid aan het nummer zou toevoegen: "The children weren't with us in Texas when we were [there recording]. I had to go to the School of Rock in the Upper East Side at 9 a.m. and face these precocious eight-to-twelve-year-olds. That was pretty scary. I had a really late night before, I had like two hours of sleep and I come in there and they're like, 'alright, whatever you want us to do.' I've never been around that many children, especially in a position of being in charge of anything."

"I got a good twenty minutes out of them. We got like four takes, maybe, and after that I was like, 'that's a good starting place, okay let's try it a few different ways.' And they all looked at me like, 'are you serious? We're done.' I couldn't explain to them and be like, I'm gonna take what you did and go work on it for eight hours. They just did twenty minutes and they thought they were in there for days.”

Naar verluidt waren een aantal ouders niet bepaald opgetogen over het hele opzet, maar de kinderen vonden het allemaal cool en een aantal hadden zelfs behoorlijk veel plezier bij de opnames. “I'm just not really used to being around kids. I wasn't prepared to be charismatic. They didn't seem very impressed with me at all. That was a surprise. It was really difficult. I'm really glad that I went through with it but it was very scary. You should never co-star with animals or children and now I understand why."

4 juni 2021
Laurens Leurs