Gotham Lullaby is a song Bjork has only sung live and has never been officially recorded or released

it is a cover originally by Meredith Monk and sung in a style of gibberish similar to skat.

    

     

Bjork has sung Gotham Lullaby only a few times:

 

1. December 11, 1999. Union Chapel, London UK. 

2. Aug 29, 2001, St John's Smith's Sq., London England

3. Sept 11, 2001, Stuttgart, Germany

4. Nov. 4, 2001, Barcelona Spain, Liceu

5. April 27, 2002, Indo California, USA, Coachella festival

6. July 10, 2003. Arvika festival, Sweden

7. November 6, 2005. New York, USA, Carnegie Hall

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Links to Bjork.com gigography, includes setlist, pics reviews:  

1. Union chapel 

2. St. John's Smith's Sq.

3. Stuttgart

4. Liceu

5. Coachella

6. Arvika festival...Arvika special on bjork.com
                     
Who is Meredith Monk? 

Just as Bjork is impossible to categorize, so is Meredith Monk...although she tends to get lumped in the genre of "classical" music. She could also be described as avant garde because she experiments with vocal range and technique, pushing the boundries (and tolerances) what is defined as "music."
                 
       

Meredith Monk's Gotham Lullaby was released on her 1977 (rereleased 2000) album, Dolmen Music. You can order it at Amazon.com. 

One Amazon reviewer, F. UYS "irridium", described Meredith's style perfectly:

 To quote Meredith Monk: "The voice is a language, a world of continuing discoveries." She uses her voice to sing, moan, yodel, squeal, whisper and gurgle, at the same time conjuring up a panoply of characters, from elderly women and precocious children to shrieking ghosts and chanting priests. With the exception of The Tale, she does this on Dolmen Music without words, restricting herself to swooping vocalisation, inventive phonemes and ritualistic incantations...All in all, a very unusual album that takes to human voice to places it's never been before. 

        

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What Meredith says of Bjork's cover (quoted from www.andrewshapiro.com):
SHAPIRO: Have you heard the new Bjork record, Vespertine? 
MONK: No, but Bjork recently did a cover of my song, Gotham Lullaby, on the internet. I haven't met her but she came to a concert of mine at Lincoln Center last summer. The Lincoln Center Festival presented a three-concert retrospective of my music called Voice Travel. She was at the third one. I like her version of Gotham Lullaby a lot. It's really interesting, so I've been meaning to write to her a card to tell her that I liked it. 

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More tidbits:
~ Bjork's versions vary with accompaniment by piano, harp or strings.
~ When she performed on Sept. 11, 2001 in Stuttgart, a teary-eyed Bjork spoke of the tragedy of the terrorism in the USA that day and asked the audience to pray for the country. She dedicated GL as a prayer for Manhatten.
~ You may have heard the original Meredith Monk version of Gotham Lullaby on Bjork's breezeblock session.

~Listen to an interview with both Meredith Monk and Bjork at Counterstreem radio. 
                          

photo from bjork.com gigography, coachella festival, shot by lfi