Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci: ‘I’ve never been in this situation before where somebody actually loves everything I do’

The Dead Can Dance singer and the US composer have worked together numerous times in the past 20 years on film soundtracks as well as the 2010 album Departum, but their new record Exaudia is, Gerrard says, “the easiest thing” that she has ever been involved with.

“It came about because Marcello had a vision,” she says. “He said, ‘I’ve got lots of bits and pieces that we worked on, why don’t we develop this?’”

Despite the fact that they were unable to meet due to Covid lockdowns in their respective countries, file-sharing enabled them to exchange ideas over the internet. “He kept saying, ‘Send me some more singing’ and these pieces grew out of nowhere before my eyes, they were so beautiful,” says Gerrard. “Then he’s gone off and done these extraordinary videos that are astonishing also. He’s gone online and found footage, people have made beautiful little pieces of cinematography and he’s compiled those and built them to make wonderful videos. I’m completely blown away, I can’t believe it.”

The 61-year-old contralto singer says she has never had “this situation before where somebody actually loves everything I do – apart from Hans Zimmer (who she worked with on the soundtrack to the Russell Crowe blockbuster Gladiator), he’s always very sweet...and Patrick Cassidy has been very good, but usually I get notes – ‘Don’t go la, don’t go dee, don’t go i, don’t go yay’. It’s so annoying, but that’s what my life is as a singer.

“There’s only two people that get an opportunity to tell me what to do: one was Ennio Morricone and the other was Zbigniew Priesner, the Polish composer. If ZP said ‘You have to sign this tune I will do it’ but most people I don’t because there’s no point.”

She likens working with De Francisci to riding her horse Mooney. “He was such a beautiful animal, he was so well trained, and when I rode him he made me look like this amazing rider,” she says. “I didn’t have to think go left or go right, he would do it, he was just such a gentle, noble animal, he was so divine – and I feel like that with Marcello. People used to say to me, ‘You’re so graceful on the horse’ and it wasn’t really like that at all, it was all Mooney doing it, and I think this project is a bit like that, it’s Marcello doing it all and I’m sort of looking really fabulous as a result.”

Working separately might have been a boon in this case. “I often have little fights with my composer companions,” Gerrard says. “I’ve always had them with Brendan (Perry, with whom she formed the band Dead Can Dance in 1981). I certainly didn’t have them with Ennio Morricone, I had far too much respect for him, or Hans, who has always been amazing, but Marcello and I have had our fights when we’ve been in the same room together. We did movies together, that’s always challenging. (This time) it was weird me being in Australia and I said to him, ‘do we need to work together because we have so many horrible fights?’ But we worked separately and it was lovely.

“My dressmaker Andrew Hutton said to me ‘no woman is an island’...but I want to be an island. I want to be somewhere where no-one can attack me, no-one can make me feel bad about myself. I’m 13,000 miles away from all of them and I can say my piece. I don’t need their money because I’ve never had any money, so how can you miss what you’ve never had. So just get on with it, do your ribbon-dancing on the croquet lawn and whatever, take the dogs for a walk and go and write some music or some poetry, write your memoirs – there are all sorts of things we can do without worrying about money because we can’t take it with us. My mother says ‘there are no pockets in a shroud’. You just do what you can while you can and enjoy it.

“I do go through difficult things with composers but I feel that’s a lovely part of life. Brendan and I would not still be working together if we did not feel there was something that had some value. There have been times where we could quite literally have killed each other but we’re still writing and it’s OK that you don’t always agree.”

Gerrard sees her job as “working in the abstract” as a singer who often performs without lyrics. “When people send me a piece of music to write to, I believe that I find that part or that essence within it that belongs to them that they couldn’t find.”

This project is a “deeply sensual” work, she believes. “There’s something quite physical about it,” she says. “He’s called it Exaudia, which is an audience of civilisation, it’s a kingdom, so it’s looking at the world, and the world is physical; it’s not soulful, it’s sensual, it’s tactile, it’s sex, it’s death, it’s eating. With the work that I do with my singing, I don’t think about those things, I’m a bit of a hedonist in that way, I reach for the higher ground and don’t want it to be something that can be analysed in the practical sense...

“But I love the fact that this album is fleshy...in that it’s about the excellence of the sun coming up and the sky and the stars, and the excellence of existence. We ignore it all the time. I love (in the video for) When the Light of the Morning Comes when that ballerina is spinning and the power stations are like horns coming out of the earth, it’s so beautiful, and then that red cape and the tower and the ice women staring...it’s almost like all these horrors that exist on this planet but in some way that ballerina in her simplicity and her excellence spins and turns with the light coming over her shoulder that is really what we do. We’re like whirling dervishes, we want to bring somebody into the corridor of meditation, and the sanctum, a place outside of the horror of being alive, and that’s what I love about what Marcello has done with this album.”

As for De Francisci, he says: “Part of a key factor in deciding to create an album with an epic orchestral-cinematic feel was on occasion I would read countless comments from fans who often referred back to Lisa Gerrard’s involvement with the soundtrack score to Gladiator. Obviously, we were not interested in plagiarising her past work, but it was a starting point to conjure something completely original in this realm. I have a fascination for history. Anyone who is acquainted with my solo work can testify to tracks that I have released in the past similar to this genre. We also entertained the idea of producing something more commercial, which resulted in recording tracks like ‘Until We Meet Again’, and ‘Stories of Love, Triumph & Misfortunes”. The production of this series and overall vocal architecture was what ultimately glued everything together into an album we can call our own, and something very personal.”

The idea of building Exaudia into a grand aria cam from Sephardic music, he says. “This fuelled the idea to pursue something, epic, passionate and supernatural while delivering vocals alluding to something somewhat tribal in nature. When I presented the first mix draft to Lisa a few months back, she shared her hesitation as I explained on the phone how the first chapter of this piece suggests a mood related to the mythological tale of Orpheus-Eurydice’s entrance into the underworld. The creation of this thematic intro, overall mix including main vocal, chants, and voice effects is captivating however in our version of this story the music portrays Eurydice as rising triumphantly from the clutches of Hades when the full orchestra comes in at about 03:10 into the piece. It was an interesting mix of cultures and something quite deep in context to draw references from.

“On the production side, I like to develop mixes that encompass a multiple-layer approach, and a key factor why I pursued becoming an engineer. This very skill set enables me the opportunity to compose and record layer upon layer of live instrument tracks without creating sonic mud. Once having a conglomerate of live performances recorded into my session I often then like to isolate instrument tracks and listen to them by themselves, moreover play around with monitoring different sets of channels. This often leads to discovering individual musical ideas that are buried in the performances that stand on their own independent of the original theme. Lisa sends me so many deeply inspiring takes; it inevitably leads to recording multiple mixed versions of one single piece. A similar approach is often common in creating a soundtrack score furthermore intuitively occurred with the creation of what you mention as (an) ‘Aria’ and particular track – ‘Exaudia’ moreover the ‘Reprise’ version. I am quite grateful to Lisa for having entrusted me with her one-of-a-kind talent for this sort of work and the creative freedom in general.”

Schedules willing, the composer says he would like to perform these pieces live with Gerrard at some point. “I aspire to take this work to the stage moreover do live concerts including a full orchestra, and choirs featuring some back-up singers to support Lisa as the front talent.”

Exaudia is out now.