The murder reporter is convinced the song had to be written about the case and by someone from the community where it happened- in addition to the street name "Foresyth" being in the song, it talked about a woman's cheek on the ground (the murder was a husband who killed his wife in front of their children & buried her in the garden), there was mention of a grey house (the family's surname was Grey, making their house literally the "Grey House"), and it talked about a "jack and a queen" (the son's name was Jack, a fact that wasn't released by the press to protect him, and the neighbors had given the wife the nickname "Queen" because they thought she was stuck up, although it was really that she couldn't socialize due to her husband's controlling behavior, something only someone from the neighborhood would have known about) She talks with a reporter who covered the murder case & has her review Clara's lyrics about it (not telling her at first that they were written 20 years prior to the crime taking place) She searches & finds a gruesome murder that took place on Foresyth Street, 20 years after Clara's death. The reporter & grandnephew talk again, she's leaning towards the "telling the future" thing and he seems to be leaning more towards "she was tragically mentally ill." The reporter looks through the notebooks/listens to the recordings to see if she can find anything specific to pin down an indisputable prediction & finds a song with a proper name in it- Foresyth. The reporter also takes the lyric notebooks to a professional songwriter because Clara's notebooks don't show any of the "rough draft/ revision" work songwriters normally go through while working on a song, which the other songwriter confirms is very weird- basically Clara just wrote out each of her songs, in their entirety, exactly as she wanted to perform them the first time she put pen to paper. She consults with a shrink who tentatively says Clara appears to show symptoms of perhaps paranoid schizophrenia but that it's impossible to make a diagnosis without having evaluated her in person. The reporter listens through the recordings & Clara often talks to herself, leaves sometimes hours-long parts of the recording with nothing but dead air on them, repeats the same words or sentences over & over, and says other strange things. After his grandmother, Clara's sister, passed away he inherited more recordings of Clara & also Clara's notebooks (which have pages ripped out) that she wrote her lyrics in. She also learns it's a sensitive subject for the grandnephew because his mother, Clara's niece, was also mentally unwell. She finds out Clara was presenting with symptoms of mental illness for nearly a year prior to her death, locked herself away in a room in her sister's house for that period, and ultimately committed suicide. The reporter talks with the grandnephew of Clara, who is a musician himself & also a skeptic about the "predictions of the future" thing because he thinks it's mostly coincidence combined with vague ominous lyrical imagery people are just cherry picking to apply to disasters after the fact. Clara, the singer of the Apocalypse Songs, only did one live performance during which she seemed to predict the death of a member of the crowd, which did come to pass. It's cited as an influence by many of the NZ alt music crowd and has gained a reputation as having lyrics that can tell the future. Sorry for the length of this, for 5 episodes the story had a lot of twists & turns:Ī reporter talks with members of the NZ music scene about an underground 1960s record known as the Apocalypse Songs.
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