Lyrics of Life: Happy

2021

11" × 22"
Set of 3 silkscreen prints on newspaper

This series uses positive and uplifting song lyrics:

Higher: (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher, 1967, Jackie Wilson (written by Gary Jackson, Raynard Miner, and Carl Smith)

World: What a Wonderful World, 1967 written by Louis Armstrong, written by: Bob Thiele (as "George Douglas") and George David Weiss.

Sun: Here Comes the Sun, 1969, George Harrison

When we play our musical soundtracks wherever we go, whenever we want, we may create very unique juxtapositions between the sounds we hear and the sites we see around us. For example, I was listening to a blues song, Reconsider, by Lowell Fulson, and the singer was painfully wailing, “So Long, oh how I hate to see you go...”, while I was driving through a cemetery on my way to a funeral.

I attempted to recreate this experience, visually, by using typography. To me, obituaries are the typographic equivalent of cemeteries. The song lyrics from blues and rock tunes were silkscreened directly on the obituary newspaper pages. Color was used to divide the lyrics into multiple voices, and each phrase can be read separately, or the lyrics can be taken in all together.

These prints are an analog/digital hybrid that use variable fonts along with high-contrasting colors to create a musical arrangement of the lyrics. The large, bright lyrics initially attract the eyes of the viewer from a distance only to have the lyrical meaning reconsidered and reinterpreted when the background and its meaning are eventually recognized by the viewer.

The newspaper, itself, will eventually fade, become yellow, brittle, and fall apart with age. The initial series was based on my original experience with lyrics about loss, but as 2020 progressed, I chose uplifting and positive lyrics to create a form of rebellion and protest against the meaning that lies underneath.