Nobody Knows!

I have made a great deal of quiet music. Albums built on restraint, on withheld resolution, on the idea that the listener will lean in if you give them room to. That work matters to me and I intend to keep making it. But this album came from watching a child, and children do not lean in. A child either lives inside a song or leaves the room.

So this record is loud. It stomps and claps and shouts, and it is sung by a girl of about six with other children joining her every time the chorus comes around. There is no drum kit anywhere on it — just hands and feet, an acoustic guitar, an upright bass, a piano, and the occasional glockenspiel. It sounds like people in a room. That was the whole ambition.

It began with a question about questions.

Adults sometimes marvel that a five-year-old can sing a song word-perfect that her parents can barely half-remember. We usually explain this by saying children like catchy tunes. I don’t think that’s it. I think a child learns a song completely because she has sung it two hundred times, by choice, and because somewhere in it there was something that felt like it belonged to her.

What belongs to a six-year-old more than anything else is asking. It’s what she does all day. Where does the water go, does my dog know he’s a dog, if I eat a seed will a tree grow in me, do fish get thirsty, who decided a dog is called a dog. These are not silly questions. They are among the most serious questions there are, and children ask them constantly and get told to stop.

So the album is nine of them. Nine real questions that small children actually ask, set to tunes they can sing back after hearing them once.

None of them are answered.

This is the part I want to be clear about, because it is the whole idea. Not one song on this record explains anything. There is no lesson, no moral, no gentle adult voice arriving in the last verse to tidy things up. Every song ends the same way: nobody knows.

I did that on purpose, and not because I think mystery is beautiful — though it is. I did it because it happens to be true, and because a six-year-old finds it thrilling rather than sad. When a grown-up says nobody knows, it’s a shrug. When a child works out that the grown-ups don’t know either, it is the best news she has ever heard. It means the world is far bigger than the people in charge of her bedtime. It means there is something left.

Most music made for children is built to teach. It counts, it spells, it names the colours, it tells you to be kind and share and tidy up. All of that is fine and I have nothing against it. But it does assume that the child is the empty one in the room and the adult is the full one. This album assumes the opposite. It assumes she is already asking better questions than we can answer, and that the most respectful thing we can do is not pretend otherwise.

On not talking down.

I’ve written elsewhere about musical condescension — telegraphing an emotion, using volume as an instruction, resolving a tension the instant it appears. I believe children are subjected to more of this than anyone. They are the audience most often assumed not to notice.

They notice everything. A child will identify a returning melody faster than an adult will, because she has heard the song forty times and the adult has heard it once. Children are the best audience in the world for structure, for recurrence, for a thing coming back changed. So the record is built properly. The songs have real shapes — verses that go somewhere, a bridge where the band drops away, a moment where everything stops dead and then explodes. There is a whole-step key lift at the end of the last song, once, because it only works once.

None of that is decoration. It is there because she will hear it.

On the funny ones and the wondering ones.

Five of these songs are fast and silly. One of them is about a sneeze and it is the loudest thing I’ve ever recorded. Four are slower — the dog, the fish, the bird, and the finale — and those are the ones I’d call wonder songs, though they never go quiet and floaty. They keep the pulse. They sway instead of bouncing, and then at the last chorus everything arrives at once and they get enormous.

That’s deliberate too. Wonder in a small child isn’t hushed and reverent. It’s whoa. It’s a kid going very still for a second and then shouting. I wanted the biggest moments on the record to be the moments where nobody knows the answer.

Who it’s for.

She’s about six, give or take a few years. She’s in the back of a car or the middle of a kitchen and she’s moving, because children don’t listen sitting down. Somewhere in the next ten years she’ll stop playing it and forget she ever knew it.

And then much later, some afternoon, she’ll find herself singing nobody knows without knowing where it came from — and by then it will mean something else entirely, and she’ll have been saying it in her own voice since before she could have understood it.

That’s the record. Nine questions, no answers, and everybody singing at the end.

— Museca

Liner Notes

Where Does the Water Go?

Every child has stood in an emptying bath and felt the pull on their feet, and every child has asked this, and no adult has ever given a satisfying answer. Down the pipe. Under the house. Then what? The song follows it as far as a six-year-old can follow it — into the ground, out to the sea, up into a cloud, and possibly back into her own bath again, which is both scientifically correct and completely unbelievable. It opens the album because it’s the simplest question here and because the water actually does disappear, right in front of her, every single day.

Does My Dog Know He’s a Dog?

The first of the wondering songs, and the warmest thing on the record. He comes when she calls him but he doesn’t know his name is a word. He’s never seen a picture of himself. He doesn’t know his own colour or the shape of his eyes or that he has a tail. And he seems perfectly happy about all of it, lying in the hallway by the wall. The song ends up somewhere I didn’t expect when I started writing it: maybe not knowing what you are is the best possible arrangement.

If I Eat a Seed

This is a child following a rule to its conclusion, which is one of the great comic forms and something small children are extremely good at. Seeds grow into trees. She swallowed a seed. Therefore. What I like most about it is that she isn’t frightened — she’s working out the logistics. Roots in her toes, leaves out her ears, birds in her hair, and the sensible practical objection that she isn’t a very big place for a tree to sit.

Do Fish Get Thirsty?

He’s in it. He’s swimming in the thing you drink. So is he thirsty all the time or has he never been thirsty once in his life? And does he know he’s wet — has he got a word for dry? She puts her face right up against the glass and asks him directly, and he opens his mouth, and she has no idea what he said. That’s the whole song. It’s the slowest thing on the album and I think it’s the one I’d keep.

Where Does the Sneeze Come From?

The loudest and by some distance the funniest. A sneeze arrives from nowhere, you can’t stop it, you didn’t ask for it, and then it’s gone and you can’t find where it came from. The song is built around that: three times everything cuts to silence while everyone goes ahh, ahhh, ahhhh — and then the whole room detonates. It widens out into hiccups and burps and yawns, and lands on the one that genuinely can’t be explained. Why does my yawn make you yawn? Nobody has ever answered that properly.

Why Do Grown-Ups Get to Decide?

The album’s one piece of mild insurrection, and the thing that keeps it from being a complaint is that she isn’t angry — she’s investigating. Bedtime happens at bedtime even when she isn’t tired. There are green things on her plate that were never her idea. There’s a word she isn’t allowed to say and nobody will tell her what it does. Then, in the bridge, she works something out: her mum has a boss, and that person has a boss, and it goes up and up. So who’s at the very top, and who tells them what to do?

Who Made Up the Words?

Somebody, at some point, decided that a dog would be called a dog. Nobody asked the dog. Once this occurs to a child it is the funniest thing in the world, and it opens a genuine chasm: a chair could just as easily be a wobble, a spoon could be a doo, her own name could have been a completely different name and she’d still be exactly herself. In the middle of the song all the instruments stop and the children simply invent better words, shouting them at each other over claps and stomps. That section was the most fun to make and it is, I suspect, the part that will get played most.

How Does the Bird Know?

Nobody gave him a map. Nobody wrote it down for him or stood there and explained. And the small one who has never made the journey before goes anyway, thousands of miles, to a place he’s never seen — and arrives. She asks a grown-up and gets told it’s in his head, which is true and explains nothing, because nobody put it there. It was already there before he ever flew. This is the closest the album comes to real awe, and I made sure it stays a child’s awe: not moved, not wistful. Astonished.

Nobody Knows!

The finale calls every question back by name — the water, the dog, the seed, the fish, the sneeze, the rules, the words, the bird — and answers all of them the same way. Not my mum, not my dad, not the tallest one there is. It starts with one guitar and her voice, gathers every instrument and every child as it goes, and lifts a whole step at the end because that’s the only place on the album where a key change would mean anything. The last word is shouted by everybody.

In the bridge she says the thing the record has been circling the whole time: nobody knows, and I think that might be the best thing in the whole entire world. I believe that’s true. I also think she’d have worked it out without me.

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