New York City harpist, singer-songwriter, and composer Stephanie Babirak pulls Moon River into darker territory, reshaping the classic with harp, mellotron, layered vocals, and guitar.
The track leads into Rotten Fruit, an album shaped by biblical imagery, disillusionment, and the gap between words and actions. Written with Peter Scoma and produced by Josh Benash, it looks at the clarity that arrives when patterns finally show.
For FM PRO Quickfire 5, Babirak talks nostalgia, darkness, creative shorthand, and cinematic harp-pop.
I’m kind of fascinated by gaslighting and how disorienting it can be to be put in that position. It’s amazing to me, the gap between who people say they are and what their actions actually reveal over time.
Q1. Moon River carries decades of familiarity. What drew you to unsettle that nostalgia rather than preserve it as something purely romantic?
I’ve played Moon River a million times over the years at shows, at weddings, and once as a duet with a musical saw player at a late-night burlesque show, which was incredible. It’s such a classic love song, but if you really listen to the lyrics, it’s also strange, and a little unsettling.
Playing it with the musical saw made me hear the song in a completely different light. I realized how eerie and haunting it could feel with the right textures, and I wanted to explore that side of of this standard.
Q2. The track keeps the harp close, but the atmosphere feels darker and more suspended. How did you find that line between elegance and unease?
Yes! This arrangement stays mostly in the harp’s lower register, which immediately creates a richer, darker sound. I avoided a lot of the sparkly, twinkly upper-range textures people usually associate with the instrument, and maybe also subconsciously associate with something celestial like the moon. There’s also no percussion or obvious groove, so I think the song feels also feels a little suspended, but the acoustic guitar does quietly keeps the pulse underneath everything.
Q3. Rotten Fruit explores what people reveal through actions rather than words. How did that idea become the centre of the album?
I’m kind of fascinated by gaslighting and how disorienting it can be to be put in that position. It’s amazing to me, the gap between who people say they are and what their actins actually reveal over time. A lot of the songs on the album circle around that idea in different ways.
There’s a lyric on Waterline that goes, “judge a tree by the fruit, and this is rotten with blight / this fruit is bad and I won’t bite,” which comes from the biblical metaphor that a good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit: “You will know them by their fruits.” Or put more simply, eventually behavioral patterns speak for themselves and people show you who they are, which is where the album title Rotten Fruit came from.
Q4. You worked on the record with longtime creative partner Peter Scoma. How did that collaboration shape the world around Moon River and Rotten Fruit?
Honestly, Peter and I have been collaborating for so long that we have a bit of shorthand between us creatively at this point. The basic foundation is that we both love beautiful, creepy music with unusual instrumentation and we were both obsessed with the band Dark Dark Dark when we first met in college.
Pete tends to push things in a more driving, rock-oriented direction, while I usually pull us toward dissonance and darker textures. Pete is also a film score composer, so he always brings some cinematic zhuzh into whatever we make together.
Q5. FM PRO TECH Q: When building this version of Moon River, what production choices helped you move the harp from a traditional classical setting into something more folk-pop, cinematic, and unsettling?
This is a fun question!! Besides keeping the harp mostly in the lower register (which from a production standpoint is much more difficult to record- that register of the harp can get muddy and run into phase issues really quickly). We also layered the track with mellotron, the same synth you hear on The Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever.
It’s one of my favorite synths because it makes everything feel slightly warped and eerie, like the sound is dipped in fog. Pete and I also intentionally chose some slightly crunchier vocal harmonies and stacked a lot of them together. Josh Benash (another wonderful friend and longtime collaborator) produced this album and on this particular track, he put heavy reverb and spatial delay on the vocal stacks to create more of a dreamscape feel.
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