Asha ~ La vie d’un oiseau

’La vie d’un oiseau’ (the life of a bird) is a piano-based instrumental vignette on the album “Sketches of innocence“ by Asha (aka Asha Elijah & Asher Quinn). CD/download here: After my debut professional album, the fully orchestrated instrumental “Open Secret“ for New World Music in 1987, in which I was mentored in studio production by my friend Anthony Phillips, an original member of Genesis, I decided to produce my next album at home, and hired the equipment. Changing direction, I wanted just to record improvised, lightly orchestrated piano vignettes, the way I played for myself when no-one was watching! That apparently simple task ended disastrously! There were so many technical issues I had no idea how to master, and I realised I had jumped into sound engineering way too soon. Such a thing is a university degree for some in its own right! A friend bailed me out, rescuing the tracks on his own equipment, but it was an expensive mistake. New World released it as a CD called “Single as Love,“ in 1988, but I wasn’t happy with my own standards of instrumentation on it. So I pulled it out of circulation, re-arranged it in 1993 with new- age maestro Phil Thornton as the studio engineer, and then re-released it. I still wasn’t completely happy with the final product, and years later I finally decided to take the better tracks, and make a compilation album called “Sketches of Innocence,“ in 2005, along with the better tracks from another piano-based album called “Art of Love.“ This album felt OK, and it’s still in my catalogue! I have managed to master song-writing, singing, playing, arranging, filming & film-editing as the years have gone by, but studio sound production has proved a bridge too far, especially digitally. The equipment often goes wrong, you have to keep up with the latest technology, that’s all pretty expensive, and... well... I’m an arty type, not an engineer type! I can definitely feel what’s right, but computer language and logic brings out the latent psychopath in me. I have long hair of which I’m fond, so I didn’t want go prematurely bald by pulling it all out in exasperation! Since then, when I make an album, I use a studio engineer! 34 years later and I’ve finally made a film for this track. On the re-arranged studio version, Phil played all the descant & treble recorders, lending it a sweet air of poignant innocence. He learned that at school! I don’t really know to this day why I gave it a French title. I love France, it felt French and I think most birds can tweet in French. The title, melody and atmosphere just arrived in my consciousness as a unified package one day. Today I know that it is the angels who orchestrate such things from above and whisper them into our souls; the angels, and loved ones who’ve passed on. We can complete things on earth that the souls in the spirit world didn’t manage to when they were incarnate. This notion spooks some folks, that the dead inter-penetrate us, but it’s true! For myself it’s a truth I love to know, and I am very happy to oblige. These days I co-create with the angels and loved ones in the spiritual world as a way of life. We have a very fluent understanding, and I am always charmed, amazed and delighted at their artistic mastery. We have tea and biscuits during co-creation; well, I do on their behalf. They have no mouths or digestive systems. But if I enjoy it, they do as well, by osmosis. I adored France as a kid, and had many holidays there. But I was an only child, a rather lonely child, and closer to the angels and elemental beings than to other children. So, in a way, I was the bird in the song. In the film I portray my child’s soul as a girl, and as a bird. For a guy, our ether body and soul are female; for a gal it’s the opposite. To be precise, bird-wise, I was a gold-finch. It was a gold-finch who drank the beads of blood on Christ’s brow when he was on the cross with his crown of thorns; the first act of communion. The film too was created by the angels and dis-incarnate loved ones. It’s true that I researched all the footage in a library, but every single creative impulse came from above. I found 49 footages that felt right (my favourite number), and, as always, once I put them altogether on my desk-top, I saw that a story had emerged. The angels are always spot-on, and I trust them completely. The story is this: we are fragile; we are of the earth and the sky; we long to soar; the holy dove descends into the pure child (“ye have to be as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven“); our physicality is human but our soul is a bird, and we sing to each other. We greet the morning with song, and where we go at night is a mystery. So the life of a bird is a good metaphor for our lives. You might very well point out that we don’t eat worms or poop on windscreens however, but I have friends in high places who I suspect just might do that if the mood so took them.