Search - Michael Hearst :: Songs For Unusual Creatures

Songs For Unusual Creatures is a family-friendly album of instrumental songs inspired by some of the Earth's strangest animals, such as the aye-aye, the blue-footed booby, the magnapinna squid, the blobfish, the elephant shrew, the anglerfish, the solenodon, and the tardigrade.

Songs For Unusual Creatures Features many amazing guest musicians, including the Kronos Quartet, The Microscopic Septet, Margaret Leng Tan, Wade Schuman (of Hazmat Modine) and Cecilia Brauer.

Songs For Unusual Creatures incorporates some of the most unusual instruments on the planet (to compliment the unusual animals) such as a daxophone, the glass armonica, the theremin, the stylophone, the claviola, and the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots.

Chronicle Books will be releasing a companion book in October.

Michael Hearst is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and producer. He is a founding member of the band One Ring Zero, which has released eight albums, including As Smart As We Are: The Author Project, featuring lyrics by Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, and Neil Gaiman, among others; Planets, a collection of new compositions to represent the solar system and beyond; and their most recent, The Recipe Project in which the band takes recipes from today's top chefs (Batali, Colicchio, Chang, etc.), sets them to music, and sings them word for word. Michael's solo works include the albums Songs For Ice Cream Trucks, the website Songs For Newsworthy News, and the soundtracks for the movies The Good Mother and The House Of Suh. As a writer, Michael's work has appeared in such journals as McSweeney's, The Lifted Brow, and Post Road. He hosts a podcast series with Rick Moody called 18:59 and is a producer for the website Cassette From My Ex. Hearst has performed and given lectures and workshops at universities, museums, and cultural centers around the world. He has toured with The Magnetic Fields, and performed with The Kronos Quartet at Carnegie Hall. Hearst has appeared on such shows as NPR's Fresh Air, A+E's Breakfast With The Arts, and NBC's The Today Show.