I was doing rehearsals with Maxwell in Seattle, and I took a train for 3 hours to Portland and we recorded Gregory in the hotel room. I worked with him on his new record, Take Me to the Alley.Īnd this song is hot off the musical presses.Ĭommon recorded last Wednesday. He was my first employer on my first tour in 2000. You got A-list talent to perform the song.Ĭommon and I go way back. We changed it to a hopeful place: “I want to go someplace where I’m safe and strong.” Since the refugees who listened had made it to America, the song is now more of a triumph. The song used to say, “God, show me where to go, I’m running, I’m so tired, I’m so worn, I just hope someone can hear my song.”īut we had to rethink certain things about it. I did it at one of the International Rescue Committee classes - they were from Sudan, they were from Burundi, places in Asia, from all over the world. I wanted to see that it was actually valid. I did a focus group to play the song for refugees. What’s different is you have to be very careful in what you say because it will be scrutinized. Is it different writing a song about a cause than writing a regular song? They’re literally running from the place that they know. We’re thinking about Donald Trump and gun violence, but meanwhile there’s like 35,000 people every day being displaced who can’t go home. It doesn’t seem like an issue that’s top of mind in the U.S.Ībsolutely. It might be hard to get people to pay attention to the refugee crisis. We scrutinized every word and statistics about what was going on. So we started this thing called “Compositions for a Cause,” and this song happens to be the first one we wanted to attack.Īndrea was the one who really opened my eyes to what was going on as far as that crisis. We wanted to help people, raise funds, raise awareness. We wanted to do something together musically and the prerequisite was that it had to be cause-related. Myself and Andrea Pizziconi were talking.
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