Our travels through the animal kingdom has brought us to the ‘Pig’ pen for our next collection of songs.
“Blind Pig” Emily Joy Green is a British-Australian singer-songwriter who performs under the name of Emmi. The Devon-born singer’s second single, “Sleep On It”, attracted the attention of Taylor Swift, who included it in her handwritten playlist “New Songs That Will Make Your Life More Awesome.” Emmi was hand-picked by director David Yates to sing this smoky jazz number, the only song in the Harry Potter spin-off movie Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them. The lyrics were written by JK Rowling, herself. When Yates got in touch in the summer of 2015, Emmi was in the middle of a break at her parents’ house. “I have two weeks with my family ever year and I got this email from someone I didn’t know saying, ‘Do you mind singing this? Here are some lyrics, give it a try,'” she recalled to BBC News. “I was like, ‘Well, this is a difficult time for me. I’m on holiday with my parents and we’re about to eat pizza, can we put this off?’ “And they were like, ‘Probably not. You should probably give this a go.'” Having finally completed the song, everything went quiet until April 2016, when Emmi got a call confirming they would be using her voice in the movie.
“Pig” is a Dave Matthews Band song from the album Before These Crowded Streets. The song evolved from an earlier tune entitled “Don’t Burn the Pig“, which was written about a television program Dave Matthews viewed in England where pigs were burned to test their reaction to pain. After 11 live performances between 1996 and 1998, “Don’t Burn the Pig” was recorded in the studio during the Before These Crowded Streets sessions, and then the song reworked itself into “Pig”, with the same notion in mind; however, it interpreted more of a carpe diem theme.
Piggies” is a song by the Beatles from their 1968 White Album. Written by George Harrison as a social commentary, the song serves as an Orwellian satire on greed and consumerism. Among several elements it incorporates from classical music, the track features harpsichord and orchestral strings in the baroque pop style, which are contrasted by Harrison’s acerbic lyrics and the sound of grunting pigs. Although credited to George Martin, the recording was largely produced by Chris Thomas, who also contributed the harpsichord part. In the context of the turbulent political climate of 1968, “Piggies” was adopted by the counterculture as an anti-establishment theme song.
“We Are the Pigs” is the first single from the album Dog Man Star by Suede, released in September 1994 through Nude Records. The single heralded the darker tone that the band had taken for Dog Man Star, which contrasted heavily with their debut album. The unsettling sound on the single was not characteristic of the popular Britpop bands of the time. The departure of guitarist Bernard Butler, ahead of its release, overshadowed the single somewhat. That event, along with the song’s music video receiving little airplay, contributed to its relatively poor charting, although still managing a No. 18 peak.
“War Pigs” is an anti-war protest song by English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released in 1970, it is the opening track from the band’s second studio album Paranoid. The original title of “War Pigs” was “Walpurgis”, dealing with the witches’ sabbath. “Walpurgis is sort of like Christmas for Satanists. And to me, war was the big Satan”, said bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler. “It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was Evil itself. So I was saying ‘generals gathered in the masses / just like witches at black masses’ to make an analogy. But when we brought it to the record company, they thought ‘Walpurgis’ sounded too Satanic. And that’s when we turned it into ‘War Pigs’. But we didn’t change the lyrics, because they were already finished.”
