What's Inside
- From Leunig's Page to Elixir's Voices
- Reading the Booklet Before Naming Who Did What
- Which Part Belongs to Leunig, and Which to Elixir?
- Three Passes Through a Single Elixir Track
- Studio Release, Official Performance Recording, Printed Programme
- Track 1 of Your Copy, Worked Through
From Leunig's Page to Elixir's Voices
The collaboration between Michael Leunig and Katie Noonan's trio Elixir begins with written language and ends in performance. Leunig's texts become material that the musicians interpret: words first met on a page are now carried by a voice, held against accompaniment, paced and coloured in ways the page cannot specify. That movement from print to sound is the historical starting point for everything in this guide.
The listening focus here is Gratitude and Grief, approached through the particular release you choose to hear. I keep the account deliberately close to the collaboration itself. Commissioning stories, premiere details and dates belong to other kinds of writing, and they tend to crowd out the thing a listener actually has in front of them: a sequence of tracks, a set of credits and a voice delivering words.
Your task as a listener has three parts. Follow the words. Hear how the musicians shape their delivery. And keep textual authorship distinct from musical interpretation, so that what Leunig wrote and what Elixir does with it stay visible as two contributions.
The method below treats the individual track as the unit of study. Each track gets its own notes, connecting a feature of the language with an audible treatment and then with your own interpretation. The result is a set of track-by-track listening notes. It makes no claim to recover Leunig's intentions, and it is more useful for that modesty.
Reading the Booklet Before Naming Who Did What
Take the copy you are about to play and turn first to its official release information or accompanying booklet. Before a note sounds, transcribe five fields:
- The displayed release title, exactly as printed.
- The edition or format you hold or are streaming.
- The track number.
- The displayed track title.
- The credited contributors for that track.
The principle behind this small ritual is that creative responsibility in a song setting is divided, and the credits are where the division is recorded. Five roles are worth separating. Text authorship concerns the words. Composition concerns the musical setting of those words. Arrangement concerns how that setting is organised musically. Performance concerns its execution. Production concerns the credited production work on the recording. Attribute each role only as the credits specify.
One field deserves particular care. Keep the title of an individual track separate from the title of any credited text. A track may share a phrase with a Leunig poem, or it may not; a matching title on its own establishes nothing about the source. A relationship between a track and a separately titled text is established through explicit credit information, and a resemblance between names is no substitute.
The implication for your notes is practical. Keep the relevant credit page or booklet beside you while you listen, and attach every release-specific attribution to the edition you are hearing. If you later move to another edition, the credits travel with that edition and not with your memory of the first one.
Credits Before Conclusions
Where the credits leave a role unnamed, describe the audible effect itself (a held note, a thinned texture) and leave the question of who made that choice open.
Which Part Belongs to Leunig, and Which to Elixir?
How do you tell, while listening, which features of a track come from the words and which come from their setting?
A workable division runs like this. Vocabulary, imagery and verbal repetition belong to the text being considered. Pacing, pitch, dynamics, syllable length, pauses and accompaniment shape its delivery. When you identify a word, an image, a verbal turn or a repetition in the credited text, you are making a text-focused observation. When you ask how long a syllable is held, where the voice drops, or what the accompaniment does beneath a phrase, you are asking a delivery-focused question.
Repetition is the place where the two most easily blur. A phrase that recurs in a recording may recur in the credited words, or it may be repeated only in performance. The way to know is to compare the credited words with the recording, line by line. Without that comparison, a repeated phrase could belong to either party.
Listen, then, for the moments where sung phrasing does something to the words:
- Where does the emphasis fall within a line?
- Is any syllable stretched beyond its spoken length?
- Does a phrase return more often than it appears on the page?
- Where does the music create a pause the text does not mark?
Treat these as questions to bring to each track. Predetermined features to tick off would close the listening down before it starts.
Gratitude and grief work the same way. Ask first which words suggest either feeling. Then ask which audible choices reinforce that reading, and which complicate it. A consoling text sung with strain, or a mournful image carried lightly, is often where the most interesting notes come from.
The answer to the opening question is only partial, because the boundary sometimes stays uncertain. What keeps the notes honest is separating observation from interpretation in distinct fields. Identifying a repeated phrase is an observation. Describing that repetition as consoling is an interpretation, and it should be labelled as yours.
Three Passes Through a Single Elixir Track
Each track receives three listenings, and each has a different job. Spreading the work across passes stops the first emotional response from being overwritten by analysis, and stops analysis from being driven entirely by that first response.
Pass one: uninterrupted
Play the complete track from 00:00 through to its end without pausing. Note your initial emotional impression in a sentence or two, and jot down any moments that pulled your attention, even if you cannot yet say why.
Pass two: with the credited words
Follow the credited words in sequence, where they are available through an authorised source such as the booklet. Choose one image, phrase or verbal turn that seems to carry the track's emotional weight, and paraphrase it. Paraphrase rather than reproducing substantial passages; the paraphrase also forces you to decide what the words are actually doing.
Pass three: back to the selected passage
Return to the moment you chose. Record its start and end positions as mm:ss–mm:ss using the player for that recording. Now listen for vocal emphasis, silence, repetition, shifts in intensity, and the relationship between voice and accompaniment.
The notes from all three passes fit into one form. I keep these fields for every track:
- Release/version
- Credit source
- Track number and title
- Credited text contribution
- Credited music roles
- Phrase or image in paraphrase
- Audible treatment
- Personal interpretation
- Timestamp range (mm:ss–mm:ss)
Keeping the release and version identifier on the same sheet matters more than it looks. Timestamps only mean something when they remain attached to the recording you heard.
What a Strong Note Does
A useful note connects one identifiable feature of the words with one identifiable musical choice, then labels the listener's interpretation explicitly as an interpretation.
Studio Release, Official Performance Recording, Printed Programme
Suppose you have found a second version of a track you already know from the release. Before comparing anything, identify what kind of source it is. Three types turn up most often: a release recording, an official performance recording, and a performance documented only by a concert programme.
Each type answers different questions. A concert programme documents billed participants and repertoire; it tells you who was announced and what was scheduled. A recording lets you describe audible delivery. A programme cannot tell you how a phrase was sung, and a recording without documentation cannot tell you who was on stage.
For each version, record its source type, displayed title, credited participants, and the published release or performance date at whatever precision the source itself supplies. Use that version's own documentation for all of it. Carrying a participant list or a date across from another version is the most common way a comparison goes wrong, because two versions of one setting can look interchangeable on paper while differing in personnel.
Once each version is identified, comparison has firmer ground. Four criteria are useful:
- Pacing: does one version move through the words faster or slower?
- Phrasing: are lines grouped, broken or breathed differently?
- Instrumental balance: does the accompaniment sit further forward or back relative to the voice?
- Audience presence: is an audience audible, and does it change the feel of silences?
Bring these as criteria, without presuming the answers. Describe the passages you heard in each version first, then interpret the differences. Give each recording its own passage timestamps as well; a time position in one version rarely corresponds to the same moment in another, and transferring it quietly corrupts the notes.
One Version, One Set of Facts
Place contextual details beside the passage they help explain, and never let a date or name drift from the version it belongs to.
Track 1 of Your Copy, Worked Through
The whole method can now be run once, start to finish, on the opening track of the release you selected. Whatever its title and credits turn out to be, you will take them from your copy and not from this page.
Step one. Identify track 1 according to the sequence displayed on your chosen release. Copy its track title exactly as printed, then copy the relevant text credit and music credits exactly from the release information. If the booklet lists a text title separately, write it in its own field beside the track title.
Step two. Listen once, from 00:00 to the end. Choose a single passage that holds your attention and mark it with a start and end timestamp in mm:ss–mm:ss format, using your own player.
Step three. With the credited words in front of you, paraphrase the central image or thought of that passage in your own sentence. On a separate line, write your emotional response. Keeping the two apart is the point of this step.
Step four. Replay the passage. Name one audible choice you actually heard. A pause, a sustained syllable or a change in intensity are prompts to listen for; record only what is there in your recording.
Step five. Ask whether your chosen treatment leans toward gratitude, toward grief, or pulls between them, and note which reading the words supported before you heard the delivery.
Step six. Join it all in one sentence, filling every bracket from your own notes:
“In [release/version], track 1, [track title], at [start–end], the words credited to [name] evoke [paraphrased image or thought]; I hear [audible treatment], which I interpret as [personal response].”
A completed entry for a single passage on the sheet looks like this: “In the Gratitude and Grief CD booklet edition, track 1, [track title as printed], at 01:12–01:28, the words credited to Michael Leunig turn on a small gesture of ordinary thanks; I hear the vocal line soften and hold the final vowel while the accompaniment thins beneath it, which I interpret as quiet relief still shadowed by loss.”
