The Guided Stroll of “Beginner’s Guide to Birdwatching”

Artists have forever been enraptured by trees. They divulge the poeticism of roots and find human semblance in how woods breathe. With one hand in the past, and one searching forward, Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Haley Blais engages this poetic canon uniquely in her track “Beginners Guide to Birdwatching” off her 2023 record Wisecrack – instead of sketching out the poeticism of trees, she constructs a forest instead. What results is a lush landscape of Blais’ design that pulls us into our reflective subconscious, and rebirths us anew.

“Beginners Guide to Birdwatching” is a sonic stroll through a canopy of trees. It ushers the listener along a dirt road, planting roots with synths and moving clouds with harmonies above. It comes abruptly in the album, after the thunderous ending of the preceding track “Winner.” This sudden switch has the effect of grabbing one’s body and pushing it out the back door, into a garden with an open gate. This sonic movement compels us to embark into Blais’ wood. The rain clears and we leave our raincoats behind willingly. We open to the journey.

The song takes an interesting journey. To start, it slowly builds up from the initial minimal accompaniment backing Blais’ vocals. The singer-songwriter layers bird samples, electronically modulated harmonies, and a growing background synth as the roots of her sonic forest. As we sit within this lush landscape, watching it grow louder as the trees sprout, Blais slowly introduces a 2019 voice memo into the recording and fades out all other instrumentation. The voice recording is only Blais, her brother, her sister-in-law, and their daughter Alma. The only sounds are of an old acoustic guitar, a baby shaker that Alma toys with, and their vocals. The adults all sing “One minute she wasn’t there and then the next minute there she was” to Alma. Occasional cooing is heard from the child, which harmonizes sweetly with the other sounds.

There’s a deep intimacy to this moment, in which Blais lets us into the depths of her memory. It feels like we’ve come inside from the woods and settled in a warm living room. Sitting amongst Blais’ loved ones, we discover that this is the family tree from which the forest stems. The listener is almost overwhelmed by the sounds of love and the strength of the family’s belief in Alma. The voice memo is a unique sonic addition to Blais’ album, as memos are typically used to demo songs, serving as a building block. The fact that Blais used it as an instrument in this track is a testament to her dedication toward intimate love and genuine reflection. It’s an authentic auditory representation of the memory, a feat only a voice memo could achieve.

Over time, Blais layers vocals atop the memo, harmonizing with her past self in the present. She adds a string arrangement, continually building spiritual sonic elements atop the intimate beauty of the living room. This is a reintroduction into her forest, but she lets the memory of the living room linger. Blais literally exists within the past and the present with this layering, as we hear her voice in 2019 and her harmonies from 2023. She’s accompanying the listener in both her past and her present, through this.

Within the voice memo, Blais speaks to an unidentifiable subject. She says, “Hey, can you join in with me? Come on, you can do it. Quietly.” This is an explicit invitation into her time warp, which immortalizes Blais as our nostalgic tour guide. She’s led us through the journey of her past and shown us how she memorializes it. Though the memory isn’t ours (this song belongs to Alma, as Blais’ brother says at the end) Blais makes it matter to us nonetheless.

The song ends with the stripped-down voice memo, guiding us back to the garden where our journey started. Blais is heard quietly, and her brother continues to strum the guitar while a sample of bees buzzing plays softly in the background. This calm outro lingers in the soul after the song is over. It’s a moment of breath and release. Now, this living room memory is part of our emotional canon. We’ve lived through it, in our own way. Our fictional walk through the forest is tangible and real. We took a journey under a canopy and felt larger than ourselves.

Blais’ environmental constructions allowed us to meditate on her memories and to open our hearts to their beauty. The journey asked us to believe in her trees, her garden, and her living room. It asked us to take up birdwatching – to trust Blais’ fictional world by giving attention to the life inside of it, represented in how we walked within the voice memo and felt its love. All this served to construct a sonic ‘guide’ toward believing in any higher power. “Beginners Guide to Birdwatching” has, truly, taught us to birdwatch. It’s taught us to embody our care. It’s taught us to plant roots in fertile ground.

Blais has taught us to remember with joy, to layer the present onto the past, and to build upon love forever and forever and forever until we die. And then, if we must die, we know how to build a forest to be buried in.