How a family recipe became a Hawksley Workman song, then a storybook

It all started with soup. From there, musician Hawksley Workman took a cherished family relationship and turned it into song. Now, Workman is translating his story of soup and a cold winter night into a children's picture book, Almost a Full Moon.

From soup to song to story

The book came from a Christmas record I wrote 15 years ago. It was an homage to my grandmother, celebrating the wild things that she brought to my life and my brother's life as we were growing up.

I was living in Paris when I wrote it. I was fasting and in order to avoid the pitfalls of fasting in Paris I hired a piano. I brought it to my apartment and I wrote this record about being home, and about sharing time, food and song with family.

For me as a songwriter it's not that I don't take what I do seriously, but a song is simple to me. I'm a conduit for the music that comes from somewhere. I'm happy to be the tunnel through which that stuff can flow. To see it take its shape in a book somehow makes the words seem heavy. In a way the pace that you read at is so different than the way a song unfolds. You don't get to rest on all of the flashiness of harmony and music production. The words are stark now. I feel that the song was always stark, but within the context of the book, even more so.

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The importance of illustration

The illustrations by Jensine Eckwall are stunning. It was a lesson to me about what illustrators do: they build a whole narrative through pictures. I was surprised by how emotional it made me. Maybe I'm at an age when I start to get weepy more easily, but some of the simple things really translated strong emotion; like a single candle in the window, or a single fox running in the snow.

Hawksley Workman's comments have been edited and condensed.