Q: When and how did the recording come together?Ī: It came together in 48 hours. With this song I feel like I’ve followed through with this conversation and it’s brought a lot of my friends in the industry closer, to a point where we’re in one accord about what we all see and know to be wrong with this country and around the world. I know that white guys don’t know what to say, what to do, and I’m just saying, “Hey man, join me.” Let’s have this conversation and put it out there to the masses so they can hear that the music community cares about what’s happening. And it’s just about starting a conversation. I hope that message becomes important to our conversations. I hope this song will live as I perform it around the world. I think we must stand for something more than just the music that we’re trying to put out. We can’t take our fans for granted, we can’t just do virtual shows and take money from people, let’s share something important. So I spoke to Dave Koz about how everyone’s got the livestream shows, it’s desperate times, nobody’s making money, and I said maybe this is a time to sow seeds that needed sowing all along. Because they haven’t personally experienced a white guy threatening them or throwing them on the ground, they say, “Hey man, you’re the one who can speak on this because you’ve lived it.” And I say, “But you live in it! You’ve been living in it for 400 years and you’re telling me I know it and you don’t know it?” I play golf literally every day with these musicians and I’m amazed when this comes up. Q: What are your hopes for the song? Could it spark some change, even if just in your area of the industry?Ī: For me at 59, it’s about evergreen timeless messages and continuing to speak out and rally the musicians I know, to keep bringing it to their consciousness. A lot of white guys use Black musicians every day but are afraid to say Black Lives Matter, because it might hurt them with their base. Bob James was one of the first guys I saw on Facebook, I had to call him to thank him, because he named all these Black musicians who helped him during his career. I started talking with my good friend Dave Koz, and I started hearing myself say that musicians, the people I’ve been associated with in the “smooth jazz” world or whatever, it’s amazing to me that I have not heard more of them speak on this subject. And for me to see this again in 2020 was enough. We usually have “Talk Tuesdays” at my house, and I told my kids, “You know, you really ignited something inside of me.” Things I have lived through my whole life, in South Africa, I’m here because I ran away from that. To top it off was seeing my grandkids and my children in downtown L.A. It was something that took me back to South Africa and it really shook me. A: The song came to me in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, his public lynching.
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