God Help The Girl biography
God Help the Girl is a musical project authored by Stuart Murdoch, leader of the Scottish indie pop group Belle & Sebastian, featuring a group of female vocalists, including Catherine Ireton, with Belle & Sebastian as the accompanying band. So far, the records released as part of the project include the singles Come Monday Night, Funny Little Frog (2009) and Baby, You're Blind (2010), the main album of the project, also entitled God Help the Girl, and the EP Stills (both published in 2009). In 2012, Stuart Murdoch plans to start shooting a musical film, which will feature the songs published in the singles and albums.
The songs of the project God Help the Girl belong to the genre of indie pop and resemble the other output of Belle & Sebastian in tone - two songs (Funny Little Frog and Act of the Apostle) were taken directly from the earlier repertory of this group. However, contrary to the earlier work of Belle & Sebastian (a group dominated by male performers), female vocalists (who are not members of the group) play the main role in the project. The songs themselves also tell about the problems of young girls entering adult life.
Origin of the project
The author of the project
God Help the Girl is Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of the Glasgow-based Scottish indie pop group Belle & Sebastian. In 2004, during a tour promoting their album
Dear Catastrophe Waitress, he came up with the idea of writing a series of songs telling about the life of girls and young women which could be sung not by his group but female vocalists. Thinking about this project, he started writing new songs which were shelved for the time being; after some time the idea of arranging them in a logical whole and making a film occurred to him.
Looking for performers for his songs, Murdoch placed an advertisement in a local magazine in Glasgow in 2004. The first vocalists who joined the project were Celia Garcia from Edinburgh, Scotland, who responded to the advertisement placed in the magazine, and Alex Klobouk from Germany, who met Stuart Murdoch on the Dear Catastrophe Waitress tour. Stuart Murdoch also held an open audition on the imeem community portal - the candidates who wanted to work with the group were to send in their demos of two Belle & Sebastian songs: Funny Little Frog and The Psychiatrist Is In. Brittany Stallings and Dina Bankole from the US were chosen out of about 400 applications; in February 2008 they were invited to a trial recording session in Glasgow. Eventually Funny Little Frog was sung in the project by Brittany Stallings, with Dina Bankole performing some of the other pieces.
In 2008 and 2009, some other vocalists joined the project, including Asya from the Seattle-based group Smoosh, Linnea Jönsson from the Swedish band Those Dancing Days; there was also one man in this group: Neil Hannon from The Divine Comedy.
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