In this very special edition of Day Is Night Diaries, we bring you the story of “Bismuth,” the third song on our album Day Is Night. The track is inspired by neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks and his love of the element whose atomic number is 83, the year he did not live to see. We dedicate this episode to the “poet laureate of medicine” and “godfather of neurodiversity” on what would be his 91st birthday (incidentally the atomic number of a silvery grey, radioactive chemical element called protactinium).
Originally appearing in The New York Times, the essay “My Periodic Table,” in which Sacks describes his feeling towards bismuth, can be found in a slender, stunning collection called Gratitude (Knopf 2015), with some lovely accompanying photographs by his partner, Bill Hayes. Both of us —
and — had previously encountered many of the closely observed, moving, and poetically crafted case histories for which Sacks is renowned - The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, Musicophilia, Hallucinations, to name a few. But Gratitude struck a personal chord, as we discuss in the episode.Even though it’s already on our album, we decided to release Bismuth as a single today, July 9, 2024, in honour of Sacks’s birthday. If you’d like to listen to the song before you check out the episode, click on the link below:
Or, if you’d prefer, you can watch and listen to the minimalist lyric video we made in keeping with the austere simplicity of the song:
To achieve the elemental/ethereal sound we decided on for the song, we thought a lot about vocal treatment. Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” and Bon Iver’s “CR∑∑KS” are not specifically referenced in the episode, but both these songs famously exemplify the “vocoder” effect that helps make “Bismuth” a standout track on our record.
On the writing front, if you’re curious about Oliver Sacks, you can visit the author’s website, managed by the foundation in his name. Steve Silberman’s article in Wired magazine is a wonderful introduction to Sacks’s writings. “Swimming with Oliver Sacks” is a moving personal essay in the New Yorker by Henri Cole. And don’t miss this beautiful piece by Bill Hayes in The Guardian, in which he writes of going with Sacks to meet Björk in Iceland (yes, you’re reading that right; we flipped, too)!
Cultural artefacts that draw from Sacks’s life and work include the 1972 poem “Talking to Myself” by his close friend WH Auden, recited here by the poet himself, and here by Sacks; Harold Pinter’s one-act play A Kind of Alaska (1982), inspired nine years after the original book’s publication by Sacks’s Awakenings, in turn made into a motion picture starring Robin Williams (as Sacks) and Robert de Niro in 1990; Björk’s visionary album Biophilia (2011) for which Sacks’s Musicophilia was an impetus; and Oliver Sacks: His Own Life, an award-winning 2021 documentary by Ric Burns.
If you like Episode Four, you might also be interested in our other conversations on creative process in this podcast. In Episode Three, we talk about the last song on our album Day is Night, titled “Stuck Record,” while trying not to be one ourselves (nice, eh?). In Episode Two, we break down “Hello Lenore,” a track haunted by Edgar Allan Poe and sundry other ghosts. "Question," the first track on the record, is the subject of Episode One.
Day Is Night Diaries is Starcracker’s attempt to document how we work as an indie rock duo across continents, as much for ourselves as anyone else. If you're a fellow creativity/process geek, performer/writer, or long-suffering friend/family member related to either of us, do subscribe, if willing, for free.
Happy listening!
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