FELLOW MORTALS, STELLA'S BIRTH-DAY

Fellow Mortals brings together Francis Reader, a founding member and primary songwriter of the Trashcan Sinatras, and Simon Dine, a composer and producer whose work spans records, film, and television. Their connection goes back to the band’s earliest years, when Dine signed them to Go! Discs in 1988 and was involved in their early development leading into their debut album. Since then, each has followed his own path, while their connection has remained in place over time. Now, nearly forty years after they first met, they are working together again in a different way.

Their new project begins with Jonathan Swift, the Dublin born writer best known for Gulliver’s Travels, who wrote a series of birthday poems for Esther “Stella” Johnson between 1719 and 1727. Stella was Swift’s close companion, and the poems became a yearly form of address, marking the passage of time while moving through affection, wit, aging, and reflection.

Reader and Dine were drawn to the intimacy and directness of the poems, along with the way their tone shifts from the playfulness of the earlier pieces to the seriousness of the later ones. Rather than using the poems as loose inspiration, they built the album directly around them, with each track corresponding to stanzas from Swift’s original text and the music built around a mix of acoustic instruments, light orchestration, electronic elements, and restrained arrangements following the language, phrasing, and movement of the poems.

I was not familiar with Swift’s poems, and I would guess I am not alone in that. That is a shame because his writing is sharp, intimate, and full of feeling. But fear not, Fellow Mortals use Stella’s Birth-Day to introduce, or reintroduce, these wonderful writings in a way that feels fresh and exciting. It is a masterclass in how to honor, interpret, and celebrate a writer’s words.