Podcast Preview: Ben Arthur’s SongWriter Season 5 with Charlie Gilmour + Matshidiso

SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring Questlove, David Gilmour, Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, Amanda Shires, Susan Orlean, and Neil Gaiman. You can hear an exclusive preview of next week’s episode featuring Charlie Gilmour and Matshidiso only at Paste.

Author Charlie Gilmour thought he was writing a book about raising an orphaned baby bird, but in the process of writing it, the book became something more personal and difficult.

“It became something much deeper,” Charlie says. “It was a book about fatherhood, about my own complicated relationship with my biological father, Heathcote Williams.”

A poet, an actor, and a magician, Heathcote‘a behavior could veer quickly from spectacular to unkind, and occasionally ridiculous. Charlie recounts how Heathcoate once accidentally set his own head on fire while trying to impress a girl with a magic trick.

In his memoir, Featherhood, Charlie considers this surprising and elusive character while also recounting the story of how he ended up raising an abandoned magpie found by his then-girlfriend (and now-wife). While working on the book, Charlie discovered that his biological father also raised a wild bird, a jackdaw. Charlie eventually unearthed a poem that Heathcoate wrote about his experience, called “Being Kept By a Jackdaw.”

“For this episode I wanted to let his poem, and my writing about my magpie, have a sort of conversation with each other,” Charlie says.