The Neil Gaiman and FourPlay String Quartet collaboration was born in 2010, when Sydney Opera House's Graphic Festival commissioned FourPlay to write a soundtrack to Neil's novella The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains for a live performance with him. That collaboration led to an ongoing friendship and creative collaboration, where Neil and FourPlay workshopped the concept of a suite of original works around the concept of the zodiac, with the traditional signs replaced by a new collection of words and objects exploring aspects of life.

They called this collaboration Signs. Some of the work on Signs of Life was developed for that project. Nestled alongside these original works are new poems and stories of Neil's crafted with FourPlay's music, two "covers" of songs from Neil's previous projects and an instrumental inspired by Neil's work

Fabric Bound CD stylised as a hardcover book