song for haiti download
Update: Yipes, I posted the wrong song link… I’ve corrected it, you can find the actual song here. Sorry about that…
This song has possessed me. New songs can do that, but this one especially. It’s rare for me to write songs inspired by a world situation; I’m normally more self and relationship-focused and inward-looking with my songwriting. Only three times have world events inspired me to write a song.
The first song, ‘The Women Are Rising,’ was inspired by the Montreal Massacre… the second, ‘Red Hands‘ (this version is from the TreeRoots Revolution CD, “Deeper Than Grass“) was written the day after they started bombing Afghanistan.
My newest song, which I wrote yesterday, is called “The Story in My Head” and you can hear it here. I posted the lyrics in a previous post, here.
To listen online, just click on the link; to download, right click and choose ’save file’. This is the first time I have ever written a song in one day and recorded it the next. It’s rough; I’m still creating the guitar part. It’s raw and edgy and dark and the pain in my voice is real.
Those disasters, and this earthquake. There’s no telling what will call a song forth, but in some ways this is the darkest thing I’ve ever written. Something about a disaster of this magnitude to a people so vulnerable and with such a terrible history stirs the deepest despair in me. Yet, by the end of the song, what is found is, not hope or faith but simple desire that love be strong… ‘love be strong, pain be healed, may all beings be real.’
That last line bears explaining, I feel. ‘May all beings be real’. Aren’t all beings already real?
No. An earlier line says, “You know that you should let me, you should let me be real.” In the song, being real implies a recognition by others of our realness, an honouring which includes the right to have enough space and time to get our needs met. The Haitian people have not been allowed to be real. They’ve never had their needs met. They’ve been imposed on and intruded on and projected on with others’ realities, and they have not been able to find one of their own, and to the extent that they had, now their realities lie in rubble and the eyes of the world are lasering them with horror and pity but not enough food, not enough water, not enough on-the-ground, here-and-now help.
I hear their anger and suffering in interviews: “Nobody cares! Nobody is helping! We are suffering!” they cry. And it makes me want to howl with the dread and despair of helplessness. I can donate cash to a charity, but it does not get to them now, when the need is greatest, and I will not see their faces.
This song is my gift to Haiti, such little as it is, in my hope that they may hear. On the radio, they said that while they don’t have water, food or electricity, the internet is working there. Which kind of blows my mind.
Haiti, if you are there, if you can read this, even if yo don’t, I’m just saying. I care. And ‘I give with what I got, and I sing with what I am.’
May love be strong, pain be healed, may all beings be real.
