Can’t Take My Eyes Off You – Megan Arnold

A screenshot from a video taken on a smartphone. The artist in the foreground is wearing a red raincoat, with rain droplets coating her glasses. Her mouth is open. In the background is grey-green-brown grass and cloudy grey skies.
A screenshot from a video taken on a smartphone. The artist in the foreground is wearing a red raincoat, with rain droplets coating her glasses. Her mouth is open. In the background is grey-green-brown grass and cloudy grey skies.

I took a solo rainy day-trip to Rivington Pike in Lancashire on the 4th of May 2021. While I walked up the hill, I sang a love song from memory (getting some of the lyrics wrong and missing half of them completely), and gasped for breath. 

I used to sing. I moved to England because of a music tour where I sang every night for 7 nights in different cities. For a few reasons, I stopped singing when I moved to England. But when the pandemic hit, I started walking more. It was a different way to experience breath and rhythm and improvisation, and walking took me out of the city, whereas singing usually took me into cities. In this work, singing and walking together became more than the sum of their parts, more than just (an) exercise. The resulting piece is a short audio recording, best experienced through headphones.

Original song written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio 

Megan Arnold is a Filipinx-Canadian multidisciplinary artist. After two years living in Manchester, England, she has returned to Canada to study at the University of Guelph.