Songwrights Apothecary Lab
Esperanza Spalding
A bespoke digital experience built in collaboration with Esperanza Spalding to showcase her new jazz album, music videos, body of academic work surrounding the project, and sell products.
Pitchfork
NPR - Now Playing
Brooklyn Vegan
American Songwriter
Under the Radar Magazine
Client: Esperanza Spalding
Collaboration with: LAD Design
Role: Lead Web Designer & Developer
Date: August 2021
Site: songwrightsapothecarylab.com
About the lab
(Pulled from SAL directly)In this ongoing lab, we experiment with sprinkling the many distillations of S.A.L. into our song wrighting, and invite you to taste/hear these enhanced essences and flavors.
(S.A.L. is also a lab esperanza curates at Harvard)
Half songwrighting workshop, and half guided-research practice, the Songwrights’ Apothecary Lab (S.A.L.), seeks to develop a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced salutary benefit to listeners.
The course is rooted in a transdisciplinary station, orienting itself towards archives and literature that study healing strategies drawn from a diverse range of music-based creative and therapeutic practices.
Half songwrighting workshop, and half guided-research practice, the Songwrights’ Apothecary Lab (S.A.L.), seeks to develop a structure for the collaborative development of new compositions designed to offer enhanced salutary benefit to listeners.
The course is rooted in a transdisciplinary station, orienting itself towards archives and literature that study healing strategies drawn from a diverse range of music-based creative and therapeutic practices.
All Formwelas (songs) from the S.A.L. are created through our research, divination, intuition, musicianship, taste, inspiration, and collaborative effort to design songs that enhance a specific salutary affect.
The formwelas offered here are not presented as potential “solutions”. Rather, they are responses to the ongoing question guiding the beings collaborating within the Songwrights Apothecary Lab.
those beings being:
- the 2020’ and 2021’ cohorts of student songwrights, student researchers (including esperanza), and the practitioners comprising our guiding council.
- Dr. Shorter
- ancestors, and artisans of the lineages informing and doing the real work within this work.
“If one of my friends is ill, I’d like to play a certain song and he will be cured”
– John Coltrane
“us too.”
– esperanza spalding and the S.A.L.
Process & Inspiration
All inspiration for the SAL site was pulled from 2 sources: Lawrence Azerrad’s graphic system designed for the physical album, and from esperanza’s express direction to have the site feel light, fluid, and dreamlike.
“How can we keep things simple for those wanting to only experience the music, but how do we allow those interested to dive deeper into what the music means?”
While on the surface the Songwrights Apothecary Lab appears to be just another album of music, the body of work behind the music was almost overwhelming. The album is composed of 3 sections, dictated by the location in which the songs were developed and recorded. Each song, or “formwela”, is accompanied by a description, “ingredients”–esperanza’s academic description of the song which ranges from a few paragraphs to entire essays, and credits for the song.
The greatest challenge in designing the SAL site was balancing a fluid navigational experience with a very clear information heirarchy.