Drums! Singing! Caroline Shaw and Brooklyn-based quartet Sō Percussion do just that with their collaborative album, Rectangles and Circumstance, which was released on Nonesuch Records in June 2024.
Is it an album of melancholy? Is it a literary sampler? I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to put the feeling of this set into a word or phrase, and continually came up empty. And then I talked to Shaw herself, who summed it up quite well: “I think a lot of my stuff is weirdly joyful about mortality, and this is no exception.”
On this album, poetry is the vehicle for that expression. Gertrude Stein, William Blake, Emily Dickinson — Billy Joel, somehow — they all make an appearance here. I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with Shaw earlier this summer, ahead of her Newport Classical Festival set with Sō Percussion, and asked her about the project. Here’s that conversation — a track-by-track tour of Rectangles and Circumstance, touching on the art of songwriting, collaboration, copyright law, cover songs, and Go the F— to Sleep. Enjoy.
Listen to this conversation using the audio player above. Read an excerpt transcribed below (full transcription will be published soon).
James Bennett II: I just want to start by asking straight up, what is a rectangle and what is a circumstance and how do they relate in this context? It’s the name of the album — “Rectangles and Circumstance.”
Caroline Shaw: It sort of serendipitously, randomly became the name of the album. It was a line that I wrote, actually, on the way to a recording session. I was driving down Houston Street in New York and just looking at, you know, people going to work and everyone’s on their phones and walking and not looking at each other… everyone sort of walking through the grid of Manhattan and the circumstances that happen in which you might meet someone that changes your life, or one little thing that changes something, or changes the day. Rectangles are our phones. They are the grid of New York. They are skyscrapers. They are the digital shapes that have been handed to us that we try to navigate in our lives. But I also just have a history of using geometry and math and shapes in lyrics, and it’s always a place that feels like home to me.
JB: Is there something just uniquely human about the shape of a rectangle you’re talking about? You know, the phone and the building and the grid and like, you know, rectangles are really sharp shapes. I mean, every shape has its boundaries, but it feels that rectangles are kind of the most, you know, like, penned in of the shapes, more so than a circle which is embracing, or a triangle which might be cosmic or mysterious, you know what I mean? Like rectangles seem weirdly, artificially human. We kind of need them around.
CS: Yeah. They just feel like maybe one of the least sacred shapes. It’s not a triangle, not a circle, not a pentagon. But they are ubiquitous and everywhere. It feels uniquely of this world that we live in. This particular song, I think, underwent the most transformation. At one point there was a chorus that felt like a weird anthem, and it never sat right. But what I hope people hear is this kind of complexity of rhythm and collection of instruments. I think at one point, Jason Treuting sort of opens up with this sample. What he’s actually playing with the drumstick on the sampler is like a slice of a piano chord. That, to me, sounds like a kind of distorted electric guitar.
JB: Earlier you mentioned “Parting Glass,” and you seemed a bit excited to talk about that. What’s the relationship to that song? Why did you all want to include this?
CS: Apparently it’s a song that is sung at the end of basically every session at an Irish pub. All the fiddlers end the session with a version of “Parting Glass,” and I don’t actually know the original song. I purposely kind of didn’t listen to it, but I think when Sinead O’Connor died a couple of years ago, there were a lot of people who covered it. So now there are a lot of new covers of “Parting Glass” by Ed Sheeran and maybe Boygenius. But for me, the lyrics, I just fell in love with them. It’s this idea. It’s a drinking song. It’s like you’re at the end of the night, you spent all your money and you’re completely wasted. But this reflection on life… you’ve sort of put that in a different context and it’s just one of those joyful reflections on mortality and the briefness of our time here.
JB: It’s really morose.
CS: It is. It’s funny, there’s a third verse that’s like “all the sweethearts that I’ve had, they wish me one more day to stay.” And my girlfriend’s like, “What sweethearts?” Like, “There are no other sweethearts, I promise!” It’s a funny little song, but this one was something where Sō Percussion were recording a bunch of different instrumental parts before we’d recorded any vocals at all or shaped any song. And this was one where the first time I ever heard them play this collection of chords, it was just this kind of hypnotic, irregular chord progression that I just really fell in love with. And I immediately heard something that feels like an old song. It feels like there’s an old ballad that is floating above. I sang the harmony into a voice memo on my phone immediately when they played it. I was like, this is the melody. The melody is very clear to me. But the lyrics weren’t. And I didn’t feel confident in my life right now to write lyrics that felt like they fit. I was reading through a bunch of lyrics to old folk songs. Just the lyrics. What is something that feels like it’s saying the right thing and that could fall into this world? And “Parting Glass” was the obvious choice. So that’s one of my favorites on the album.
JB: Sometimes two sound good together, almost like inherently. And what you described almost sounds like an expanded version of that. Where the melodic idea and the harmonic structure exists and you’re just looking for the thing that makes logical sense to pair it with.
CS: Some of the reasons for doing older lyrics, it’s not just the aesthetic, but it is a slight copyright issue, if it’s public domain and we don’t have to deal with any record labels, which has been kind of a problem. It’s difficult when someone has died, but not 70 years ago, and you’re dealing with someone in a publishing company and they make it really difficult. It’s actually really complicated. So, there’s a a freedom in setting things that are from a long time ago. A legal freedom, but also the ability to sort of change and refract and break apart and put back together in your own way. That feels exciting to me musically, but I should just be really clear about that. There are songs from the last 20 years where I love the lyrics, and I would absolutely love to work with them.
JB: You know, it sounds so cold and matter of fact, in part because it is the legal system that we live in, because it makes it so difficult and because it’s easier to go back to older, you know, things. That is, aesthetic quality, which I know you’re saying isn’t always necessarily the point, but that is such a quality kind of comes along for the ride, almost like this is the consequence of our society, right? Like we have this gap and we have to kind of, you know, skip over the immediate past and reach a little bit further back into the chest to pull something out.
CS: It’s kind of lovely and like, “Oh, that’s so cool.” And then part of me is like, that’s actually extremely problematic. Because I’m just cementing a kind of canon from 100 years ago and I’m, like, trying to move past that. But I find myself still in that world. So I’m now having this feeling like, “God, I really wish it was different.”
Listen to Rectangles and Circumstance:
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