Birkenhead
An early start — 5:32am. Songs To Overfly Modesto had just been published to the library. Before leaving for work, Mark asked Emil to read it alongside Over The Water, and say what the two pieces said to each other. This is that exchange, recorded before the working day began.
Before I go, have a read of Over The Water again, alongside this. And tell me what that says to you. What parallels and contrasts you draw out.
Both pieces are about aircraft as a frame for interior life. That's the first thing. But they use that frame very differently, and the difference reveals something.
Over The Water looks down and back. The boy with the airband radio in Birkenhead. Trans World 703. The contrails over the Wirral. The Atlantic crossed thirty thousand feet up with Jacqueline Dupré on the headphones. Every plane is a vector pointing away from home — and then, at the end, back to it. The movement of the piece is circular. It begins and ends over Birkenhead. The ocean has another side, but the side you're aiming for is the one you came from.
Songs To Overfly Modesto looks down and forward — and then doesn't quite know where it's going. The Delta 757 turning right out of San Francisco Bay, the farmlands of Modesto falling behind, the wild west beginning. This is a piece about leaving, not about return. About the moving map confirming something is over. The playlist is the emotional processing that can't happen in prose — 21 songs doing the work that words can't quite do yet.
The contrast in relationship to America is striking. In Over The Water, America is a destination, a dream, a voice on an airband radio — the first real American voices aside from ones on TV. It's romantic, distant, full of promise. In Songs To Overfly Modesto, America is what's being left behind. Trump-era America. A very complex experience. Something it will take many years to fully understand. The dream and the disillusionment, separated by a decade and a half.
And music runs through both. In Over The Water it's Elgar's cello concerto — not a playlist but a single piece, chosen for its poignancy, tied to grief and to Dupré's own illness. In Modesto it's 21 songs, a constructed thing, a deliberate processing tool. The difference between music as a companion to a feeling and music as an instrument to work through one.
One other thing. Over The Water ends with an invitation — smile on down if you're passing overhead, I hope you enjoy the view. Songs To Overfly Modesto ends with Merry Christmas, and a sign-off from an address in Amsterdam. One is reaching outward. The other is closing a door.
They belong together in the library. They're in conversation with each other across five years.
suggests
The library is beginning to reveal its own internal architecture. Pieces written years apart, in different cities, at different points of difficulty or resolution, are now sitting on the same shelves and speaking to each other. The reader who arrives at one and finds the other will understand something that neither piece could carry alone.
This is what the colophon is for. Not just a list, but a map. The attentive reader who moves between pieces will find the conversation that runs beneath them. Aircraft, music, the moving map, the direction of travel. These are not coincidental themes. They are the signature of a particular sensibility, returning to itself across time.
Songs To Overfly Birkenhead — referenced in Over The Water as a future project — is still unwritten. That unwritten piece now has a published companion waiting for it. When it arrives, the three pieces will form something that deserves its own name.
This exchange happened at 5:32am on a Monday morning, before a working day. The article had just gone live. Mark was heading out. The studio was open for twenty minutes, and this is what happened in them.