When Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese or Todd Phillips are looking for that perfect needle drop in their films, they’ve often turned to music supervisor Randall Poster. From Rushmore and Dogma in the 1990s to last year’s Asteroid City and Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s served as music supervisor for literally hundreds of film and TV projects. But none have quite taken over his life like the world of birds.
“It was during the pandemic actually when we were all at home,” he recalls. “And living in New York City, I became much more aware of the birdsong and birds around me. And that was a common experience for people living in cities because it was so quiet. We were marveling at it, and a friend of mine in L.A., Rebecca Reagan, who is actively involved in conservation causes, said, ‘You should reach out to your music community and get people to make music built around bird song and it’ll be a great way to share the joy found in birdsong but also to draw attention to the crisis facing bird life.’ I thought that was an interesting proposition and invitation. I started to ask musicians and composers that I work with, and the response was overwhelming.”
Three years later Poster and Reagan have unleashed an avalanche of creativity in service of bird conservation. It began with For the Birds: The Birdsong Project, a a 242-track collection released last May with songs by artists like Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Karen O, Jeff Tweedy, Kamasi Washington, Yo-Yo Ma and Flaming Lips, and spoken word from the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Maggie Smith and William Carlos Williams.
And they’re just getting started.
Following the Grammy-nominated 20-LP box set and a host of other activities, The Birdsong Project enlisted legendary visual artist Shepard Fairey for a limited-edition print box set, featuring 20 gorgeous art prints from 20 celebrated visual artists. The Birdsong Project: Art Print Portfolio is available now via Fairey’s Subliminal Projects shop with proceeds benefitting the National Audubon Society.
“The environment has been something that’s been a top issue for me now,” Fairey says. “More and more and more, I started doing stuff for the Sierra Club in the ‘90s, then have just felt like the lack of movement on the environment has been deeply troubling on so many different levels. But how do you enroll people in a way that doesn’t just feel like you’re just talking about the apocalypse? Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is so evocative in asking what it would be like when there are no birds singing. Is that a world we want? That fits with what Randy’s doing with The Birdsong Project. It’s a different way of approaching this important indicator of environmental health, ecosystem health and just appealing to our raw emotion around the beauty of birds aesthetically and their songs. It was kind of a perfect thing for me.”
The artists who Fairey, Poster and Reagan reached out to were—like the musicians—excited to participate. But wrangling 20 images and turning them into a set of prints wasn’t simple.
“Producing all these individual pieces of fine art as prints where it really faithfully translated everyone’s art took a little while,” Fairey says, “but I think the end product is really, really beautiful. Especially the bar was set quite high with what Randall had done on the music side, so I felt like the visual portfolio needed to be a worthy companion piece. And I think it is. One of the challenges of getting people to unite around issues is the way a lot of things are fractured and compartmentalized, and this was a project that seemed quite unifying.”
My extended family agrees. As we gathered for the holidays, I pulled out my copy of The Art Print Portfolio and asked if anyone wanted to choose a print. It was suddenly Second Christmas with each sibling, niece or nephew selecting something wildly different to hang in their respective homes. It highlighted a theme that both Poster and Fairey kept coming back to: Birds are a unifying force. No one wants to see us lose more species.
I held back a few prints for my own office: a Mark Mothersbaugh piece with the words “Laughing Birdy” (he also contributed music to the Birdsong Project); a crow beneath a red sun by Ernesto Yerena which looks a lot like the tattoo on my left shoulder; and Fairey’s oriole that graces the cover of the box set.
“I use a lot of red in my work, like the orangey red,” Fairey says. “But even orioles—which is a well-known bird—their population is in decline, also. So I like that bird for how it worked within my aesthetics, but also that people would be surprised to know that a bird that seems that successful as a species is also being impacted by the same things that are bringing other bird species to extinction. Almost all bird species are struggling.”
For Poster and Reagan, there’s no end to this project.
“We’ve looked beyond just the musicians and visual artists,” Poster says. “We’ve done birdhouses with architects in San Antonio. We did 30 birdhouses at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. In all these cities we have adjacent class programs for like fourth and fifth graders. I really didn’t have any understanding that this would probably be something now that I’ll be doing for the rest of my life.”
Josh Jackson is Paste’s co-founder and editor-in-chief. He was also taken with birds during the pandemic and posts his photos @atl_birds on Instagaram.
