Each song on singer-songwriter Kris Delmhorst's new CD, Strange Conversation, has its genesis in a poem, by writers such as Lord Byron, George Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
The singer-songwriter took the words of some poems verbatim and set them to music. For others, she worked from the essence of a phrase and transformed the original work into something else entirely.
Delmhorst also worked to match poems to certain musical styles: Beatles-esque pop for Whitman, a Dixieland band for Eliot.
Delmhorst says she got the idea after reading Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's," which is the poet's tribute to a Venetian composer.
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