SPOTLIGHT: Humbird’s Siri Undlin on Songs and How They Find Us

EDITOR’S NOTE: Humbird is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for April 2024. Read more about her and her new album, Right On, out today on Nettwerk, in our interview. And look for more all month long.

Once upon a time, there was a song. Or at least, there was the idea of a song, an inkling of the way it might ride on the wind of a passing moment or live in the quick frame of a second. Ancient and also yet-to-be, a song sprouts as a hunch in your gut, or a glow between your eyebrows. It slips along the pearly minutes. Where does it want to go from here? Where might it take you if you let it? I can’t tell you why all this started or how it will end. Maybe you’ve heard this story before, only different. It never stays the same, does it?

Once upon a time, or maybe twice, and also right now, there is this thought of an invisible thing, a sequence of notes more than a hum but less than a stone, bright as lightning. This thing wants to inhabit the room of your ribcage, your mouth, an echoey stairwell, the shower, the front seat of your car, a dive bar, the dance hall, any cavern where it might resonate for a spell. It seeks a space where it might rattle around and move through the fragile bones of an ear’s drum and play along with a pulse. Is that because it wants to be alive, briefly, in a body? Eventually, the song will float away again.

Once, and also many times, a melody has landed amongst us and brought the shape of the mountains, the valleys, the rivers with it into a small room. We gather under the roof, by the fire, between the walls to marvel at this impossible feat of transformation. How does it all fit? Even when we are surrounded by concrete, trapped in the glass and steel, tangled in wires and flashing signs, a song can have us drinking the fresh waters of a cool stream. Is it any less miraculous simply because it is ordinary? In the presence of a song, somehow, even a cage might become an instrument, an organ thrumming with possibility, revolution.

Once upon a night after night after night, I climbed into the pumpkin carriage with four friends. The song sat amongst us, our Cinderella, dusted off and shining in her silver-tone gown. Look at us mice, transformed into coachmen, along for the ride, accompanying her to the ball. The carriage is also a van. Tonight, the ball is at the Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, or maybe the Hi-Fi in Indianapolis, or the Owl Parlor in Brooklyn. Will Cinderella find her prince in these places? That person who listens and truly hears?

When the clock strikes midnight she will run, of course. We all know the story. But maybe, for those of us in the room, we’ll be left with something iridescent, reflective, something like a glass slipper, so perfect and fragile. What an absurd thing in this harsh and hard world. It will break. Like a bubble that bursts at the gentlest touch or a summer storm collapsing into the prairie grass. The evening ends, the lights come on while the song echoes outward and maybe never stops. It’s real magic because it has changed us. The scientific evidence of this enchantment is the shivers, the tingles that travel up the spine, the goosebumps on your arms. The silence is the next, important, part. We need that too. Songs know this. They leave us for a while to steep in it. They will return. Cinderella comes back again tomorrow night because the story isn’t over yet.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago in a land oh so close to here, a fairy godmother tapped me on the shoulder with her wooden spoon and said, “Songs don’t need you sounding like someone else. Give them specificity, the strange topography of your own throat, the events your own eyes behold. These are the materials they need from you. They belong to the wind but might stay long enough if you prepare the space, make them welcome.”

Once, another time, a stranger passed through town and picked a sewing needle out of a stacked tower of golden hay. I wonder if I am the needle, taking the thread through the eye, piercing and piecing the fabric together into some strange quilt. Or am I the hands that feed the old Singer machine, hunching my back and squinting for the sake of some larger vision? The old stories remind us: Beware of pricked fingers, of enchanted sleeps, of perfection, of jealousy.

Once upon a summer evening, a handsome frog croaks upon a lilypad, burps up a golden ball, is waiting for his kiss, will sing along as stars dissolve into dewdrops. It’s all true, I swear! True enough, anyway. You’ll believe me when you awake early in the morning and venture out the screen door. You’ll know exactly what I mean as the droplets lap at your ankles, soak into your soles. There are so many places a kiss can land. So many songs dancing above your head. Keep your pen and paper within reach — the songs don’t always like to wait around.

But when songs are lost, are they also finally free? Do we remember forgotten melodies in our dreams?

Once upon a time, and always, the world was alight with music, the composition of what’s happening, the betweenness of exchange and encounter wrapped in story so that it might be remembered. A long time ago, a person took the gift of a song and sold it. I wonder how it went, if they had a choice. In a fairy tale, there is often a trick within the trade. Can you put a price on something you don’t understand? That transcends time and space, that outlives empires and wars and the mighty dollar? Do you dare? And what will it truly cost you?

In the future, there will be music. I know this because songs are wily time travelers. They move forward and backward and all around the edges and margins and also right in the Times Squares of everything. Once upon a time, I thought a song was enough. I know better now. A song is more than that. A song is a bright candle and also invisible. It is the thread, it is the wheel, it is the door, it is the difference.