The Weekly Song |
The Weekly Song was a creative project of 2017 where I wrote, recorded, and released a song and video every week. On indefinite hiatus for now, but preserved for posterity below.
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I've written my fair share of derivative and referential songs, but I've never written a song based on a single article. Until now, that is. This song was inspired by a piece by Manny Fernandez (with stunning photography by George Etheredge) titled"A Path to America, Marked by More and More Bodies" published in the New York Times on May 7th, 2017.
It is, at once, fascinating and heartbreaking. Please take the time to read it. The heart of the story is in the details, but the facts themselves are also staggering. For example: "More people have died illegally crossing the southwestern border of the United States in the last 16 years than were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina combined." And yet, no widespread acknowledgment of this issue as a humanitarian crisis exists. One wonders why. I'm currently reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. This morning, I am contemplating how the lives we find valuable and the suffering we speak out against is largely determined by notions of culture, ethnicity, nationality, and other constructions Harari would refer to as myths that maintain the imagined order. Part of our uniqueness as a species (as Harai tells it) is our ability to create these myths that cause us to unite in much more coordinated ways than could be dictated by our evolution alone. This ability is probably the greatest double-edged sword of our existence. It is strange, and a little terrifying, to think that something powerful enough to influence how we value human life exists only in the collective imagination, essentially created out of thin air. On the brighter side, I often think of songs in particular and art in general as being created out of thin air as well. And this thought, next to the one before it, reminds me of a Sally Mann quote I can never quite remember exactly but think of all the time. Something about capturing life's random, dichotomous swing: the full sails and the ashes as well. Maybe you know what I'm talking about. All life, all thought is collage. Any given moment for any one of us is just a snapshot of our personal rabbit hole. This is the view from mine this morning.
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Karen Schantz Alan Bargar Lyrics A red bandana stained his skull who he was we'll never know the water jugs that mark the souls lost to the wilds of Brooks County, Texas A brand new baseball, a rosary a beaded bracelet, a green knot of thread, a Spanish copy of Psalms and Revelations: the precious cargo of the dead In sandy soil not much can grow the surest way around Border Patrol the Ranchers know the bloody toll the sun shows no mercy in Brooks County, Texas No one knows about the wife and kids in Houston or questions whether they'd prize family over law no one knows the nightmares of the dispatch worker who by fate or luck, received the fatal call Does your passport earn you compassion? Does your green card glorify your grave? Does your citizenship make you human? Are we all just gonna look the other way? A red bandana stained his skull who he was we'll never know the water jugs that mark the souls lost to the wilds of Brooks County, Texas the lost souls of Brooks County, Texas to the lost souls of Brooks County, Texas
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