22nd April 2021
Last week I listened to “Take Hands: Singing & Speaking for Survival” for the first time since 1984. This freshly digitized collaboration of music and spoken word features poet and memoirist Honor Moore (with music by guitarist and composer Janet Marlow), essayist and poet Susan Griffin and myself. Our intention was to give voice to a shared conviction — and grave concern — that we had entered into a moment of existential threat to humanity and the earth through the proliferation of nuclear weaponry and power. We were determined to convert our sense of powerlessness to action through art.
My song, “Who Among Us?” opens the program, with lyrics conjuring a playground, mothers and children at play… a taut combination of deep concern and social consciousness wrapped in a “merry-go-round” musical accompaniment. Susan’s voice as she reads “A Woman Thinks About War,” is without artifice, a crystalline presence that leads us inexorably by the heart and hand, to a devastating narrative of a nuclear bomb test including soldiers. “Woodland,” a wistful solo piano meditation, is a resting place which prepares us for Honor’s cataclysmic tour-de-force, “Spuyten Duyvil”. Her poetic reading is made all the more arresting by the original guitar accompaniment of Janet Marlow. At times, Janet’s music works as a kind of call & response for Honor’s shuttering ribbons of imagery.
Today I have posted “Take Hands…” on my YouTube Channel, in its entirety and in bite-sized parts using the YouTube Playlists feature.
This project had been gathering dust in my basement until late last year when I stumbled upon it in a box of old cassettes. What does it mean that this collective call to community and action has surfaced again — at this moment?
Well…currently, 37 years later, there are 16 wars and 27 so-called “minor” armed conflicts taking place around the world. Nuclear weapons and climate change continue to be the greatest threats to planet Earth.
And, today is Earth Day 2021, a day when people all over the world come together to celebrate and raise public awareness about the planet’s environment — as we have been doing since 1970.
There is something quite haunting — and tragic — about this artistic collaboration’s contemporary relevance. At the same time, the accumulation of words and music has a ferocity about it — like a small but determined street demonstration.
Take Hands!
