Body of Songs: the Liver with Ghostpoet

Curated by BBC Radio 1’s Gemma Cairney and composer Llywelyn ap Myrddin, Body of Songs is a project that explores the human body through music. The Music Court will profile each track in the compilation. The final four tracks will be announced this summer, and an album will follow. The concept is described best on their website:

“A collection of 10 songs by some of the UK’s most talented artists, inspired by the body’s organs.

Hidden from view, suctioned together in dark flesh, the organs are the core of our physical functioning, and our emotional and feeling world.

Each artist explores an organ with the help of experts, to find out how it works and unlock its mysteries and myths. Along the way they ask profound questions about their own lives; about illness and disease, and age and suffering.”

More information can be found at bodyofsongs.co.uk. 

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After hearing “Follow Me Through,” you’re probably realizing that this Body of Songs thing isn’t at all what you expected. The organs that are chosen are very specific, and even stretch the definition of “organ” (coming up: blood?). For now, we’ll explore Ghostpoet and his left-field contribution to the project: “A Plateful of Liver.”

Ghostpoet is a smooth-talking hip hop artist who shows his artistic side in “Liver.” He sets this apart from other music in his career because he doesn’t use his most identifiable instrument, his own voice. The track is then less about the story and lyrics, and more about an urgent feeling welling up in Ghostpoet. Concerned over his own drinking, Ghostpoet chose to explore the liver, explaining,

“I chose the liver because as a heavy drinker at times, I felt it was necessary to discover more about an organ I was potentially destroying as a past-time. What I realised as my journey of discovery unfolded, was that the liver is a much more complicated and essential organ than one could imagine.”

If you listen to one of Ghostpoet’s older tracks, “Cash and Carry Me Home,” you’ll get a sense of the mortality and impending decline that he anticipates for himself as a result of his actions. But “Liver” proves that Ghostpoet is beyond that. He layers in a doctor’s discussion of the liver to serve as the main plot of the song, but the instrumentation is both ambient and industrial at the same time, removing any kind of illusion of songwriting structure. And this is what frees it. Ghostpoet created this song as a testament to the strength of the liver, his own in particular; during his research, he underwent a fibroscan- a test for liver disease- and results indicated he was completely healthy, despite his self-proclaimed past-time. Congratulations, Ghostpoet! I’ll drink to that.

For more information on Ghostpoet, visit his website, Facebook, and Twitter. For more information on Body of Songs, visit the project’s website.