Quick Said the Bird
Guide Footprints on Yellow Roads
Homepage: http://www.myspace.com/quicksaidthebirdmusic
Feature By: Lauren Kastner
Photography By: Levi Ely / Jonathan Earley
In a bedroom decorated with cartoonish butterflies and feverishly pink paint fitting only the tastes of an eight-year-old, the five members of Quick Said the Bird mull over a particularly troubling phrase of chords that none of them bothered to write down - a setback they all take light-heartedly. The band is practicing in Nick Morrow's temporary residence while the owners he is house-sitting for are away in England.
It might be the serpentine black cords covering the floor, the tender sound of rain from a cracked window, the premature humidity of June, or the dim lamp-light of the abandoned little girl's room flooding the hallway of an otherwise dark house, but something about these conditions combined with the potently beautiful sound of Quick Said the Bird is absolutely narcotizing.
If you had asked Nick Morrow a year ago that the members Quick Said the Bird would be playing together he never would have suspected that they would be doing what they are doing at this point, or even recognize the names of most of his new band mates. Morrow, a well-established solo artist in Columbus, along with Kyle Battin, Rachel Bell, Steve Riche, and Melissa vanSpronsen connected through a series of coincidences and serendipitously convenient happenings that led to the formation of Quick Said the Bird in May.
"We had a couple sessions just to play some music and whoever stuck around is pretty much the band now," Morrow said. "Once we started practicing we realized we had something really special and if we just put a little more structure to what we were doing that we could actually be a legitimate band."
“Every time we play I don't think we realize the kind of growth that is going on. It is kind of like our musical personalities getting to know each other.”
A principal element of Quick Said the Bird is their unpredictable and ever-varying moments of creativity.
The band is still a baby, less than two months in the making, but when it came to finding a name, Quick Said the Bird was a perfect fit. Through another instance of fate, each member had an independent encounter with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, from which the first stanza of the first poem revealed meaning.
In a series of excited emails to each other, each member described their experience with the poems. Bell and vanSpronsen were both reading A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken in which the Four Quartets were frequently praised. Even Andy Miller, the band's illustrator, had a hand in the choosing of the name after a time of prayer and having listened to a lecture series in which, strangely enough, the Eliot's Four Quartets were quoted.
The band couldn't ignore the signs and christened themselves with Eliot's line, "Quick, said the bird."
"There is a lot of prayer that goes into our writing and practice sessions," Morrow said. "We always start practice by just having an indefinite time to just pray together and to ask for that inspiration, creativity, peace, and love between us as a group of people."
The band will begin pressing and distributing their first album, The Advocate, this summer through The Body Electric Productions. As far as the purpose of Quick Said the Bird goes, the reality of making music for a living has not been an issue.
"You have to look at music like a Corvette that you may pour a lot of time and money into but you may never sell it," Morrow said. "As far as having to work other jobs to make it, I think all of us have kind of accepted that starving artist lifestyle. For us as a band, who we are on stage or who we are as performers is just a natural extension of who we are as people and that that is just an honest representation of our lives."