This is the story of how La Mitad by Paper Beat Scissors, featuring songs taken from an album originally in English got to be re-sequenced and sung in Spanish. Montreal-based, but English born Tim Crabtree released Parallel Line in 2019, an album of folk music that burned with an intensity that was hard to match. The story could have ended right there, but fate, as it sometimes does, stepped in.
Crabtree found himself in Nova Scotia to play the role of Freddie Mercury in the city's annual Pride concert. In Halifax without much to do before the concert, he found himself listening to a song from his youth, "Just Another Day" sung by Jon Secada. The next song on the streaming service was a Spanish version of the same song. Striking a responsive chord within Crabtree, he returned to Montreal determined to translate and record Spanish versions of some of the songs on Parallel Line. He is, of course, a dabbler in foreign languages (During the pandemic he's been working on learning Mandarin from a Taiwanese friend using Zoom).
His love of Spanish stems from field research he conducted while in Argentina working on his master's degree. Yet translations can be tricky, so before recording anything he turned to a friend, Mexican musician and art historian Itzayana Gutierrez. She made sure the flow and pronunciation made sense, and according to Crabtree, "made sure they passed the 'Cat Shit' test" (when the phrasing or context of a line makes it sound like something it's not supposed to).
Singing in Spanish, a song like "Formas" becomes even more hypnotic. As Crabtree relates the song is about, "the knots we tie ourselves in, the messes we get ourselves in, but lay at another's door, particularly in the realm of relationships." The song builds and builds, with the pedal steel of Mike Feuerstack (Bell Orchestre) and the French horn of Pietro Amato (Patrick Watson, Land of Talk) taking the track to another dimension before it finally strips back to guitar.
"Gracia" deals with the flaws in each of us. Acoustic guitar and string quartet work in unison to create both tension and release, with the choruses asking first, "Me mandas fuera hacia al frio ?es eso tanto?"/ "You send me out in the cold: is it enough?" and answering later, "no es tanto"/ "it's not enough".
If there's a question that remains it's whether one really needs a Spanish language version of songs from Parallel Line. There's beauty in the singing and the songs that extend beyond language. There are examples everywhere, from Robert Wyatt singing in Spanish to Peter Gabriel and the Beatles in German, not to mention the works of Sigur Ros. The magic is in the music and that has always been there with Paper Beats Scissors and it's there in La Mitad.
