"Hypnotic, inventive and mournful. Unique!" (Lost in Music Radio, Glasgow)

'Happy Birthday', the latest single by Marianne Dissard, was originally intended for her 2021 album 'Rappel', a collection of 'lockdown' covers produced in collaboration with Raphael Mann. Like the rest of that album, it was recorded with musicians from Tucson and the UK all working in isolation from their respective home studios over the first year of the pandemic.

With her cover of Carly Simon's 1990 bittersweet ode to adulthood in the AIDS era, Marianne wanted to offer a sense of the loss and disorientation most of us felt in 2020. To that end, she asked her collaborators to record their own interpretation (in D#m) of 'Happy Birthday' without giving them any indication of tempo, specifying instruments they should use, or letting them hear anybody else's parts. She would effectively be building a song from truly 'isolated' parts. Imagine, if you will, a computer screen split into little Zoom squares, each participant attempting to sing 'happy birthday' from a different time zone through lousy wifi connections to the pixelated sparkle of birthday candles... and remember that particular sense of longing many of us experienced during lockdowns when we mourned the physical connection with loved ones.

And so Terry Edwards, UK multi-instrumentalist and saxophonist to the indie stars, sent a fully fleshed out arrangement of trumpets, guitars, shaker, and claves. And from Tucson, old friends Naïm Amor, Marco Rosano (Orkesta Mendoza), and Vicki Brown sent snippets of guitars, piano, clarinet, and violins. Never one to do things halfway, English multi-instrumentalist and producer Raphael Mann (The Silver Panda, Art Terry) sent layered tracks of vocals, guitars, and Clavinet amounting to a full run through the song. Marianne then proceeded to order (or disorder) these disparate parts, arranging a mosaic of sounds she would link through her singing and that Raphael would polish and mix into this unique take on Carly's song.

As Raphael points out, "the lyrics allude to Joni Mitchell’s ‘Woodstock’ (also covered by CSNY). Joni’s lyric - “We’ve got to get ourselves back to The Garden” - is referring to the Garden of Eden from The Bible, using it as an image of the natural world before mankind ruined it. In other words, we’ve got to get back to nature... Carly is using that lyric to allude to the West Coast ‘hippie dream’, that was the counter-cultural orthodoxy of her youth; and has been replaced by the time of ‘Happy Birthday’ by a neurotic obsession with health, and a post-AIDS caution about sexual promiscuity, etc. Of course she has grown older too, and she’s partly talking about a universal change in attitudes that comes with middle age - but the cultural shift away from ‘peace and love’ towards this sort of hyper self awareness is also a part of it".