Stomp it out

We Are the World All Over Again

In our church young people are selling baked goods and cat sitting to raise relief funds for Haiti. Adults have answered the call of a local Haitian church to help them send rice & beans & bucks. Nine year old Robine Koerts and her classmates raised about €200 in donations for Haitian disaster relief singing 1985's We Are the World during Music Night at their Netherlands school.

Chickens in Love

A whole lot of 826LA students with a whole hen house full of volunteers and The Submarines, perform Chickens in Love, a song they wrote at "Songwriting with The Submarines"— a workshop sponsored by 826LA where children learn about music and how lyrics are created by working with professional Los Angeles musicians. Two workshops were held this December. Musicians Michael (Frankel), Heather (Kissing Cousins), Sean (Nico Stai), Blake and John (The Submarines), Eli (The Monolators), Ken (Hexham Heads) and 826LA volunteers worked with 24 kids to help them create their own songs.

The kids broke out into 12 groups, each paired with a musician and/or volunteer. Each group came up with a subject and wrote a song with multiple verses and a chorus. The groups had an hour to get creative, write the lyrics, develop a melody, and then perform it for the other workshop participants.You can see/hear these songs as performed at http://www.826la.org/chickensinlove/pledge-now/. Vote for the one(s) you like best in a fund raiser for 826LA.

These 12 songs have been distributed among 12 LA based bands to cover the songs. Each artist is donating their time to create a project like no other. The artists involved are:
– Fiona Apple
– She & Him
– Cold War Kids
– Tim & Eric
– Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
– Dum Dum Girls
– Summer Darling
– The Growlers
– Crystal Antlers
– The Happy Hollows
– The Submarines
– The Pity Party

Each artist/band is allowed to get as creative with their version as they want so long as they don’t change the lyrics. These 12 songs will appear this Spring on a Limited Edition LP and CD as well as a digital download on iTunes. All proceeds from these sales will go right back into the program that provides these kinds of opportunities for children.

Hard Times Come Again No More

Once a year to our Unitarian Universalist community comes Music Sunday. The bluegrass band played Gillian Welch's heart wrenching "Orphan Girl" and the choir reached back for Stephen Foster's "Hard Times". How can an hour of hard times and a girl yearning for death's reunion be uplifting? I guess you'd have to be there. "Let the Mystery Be."

This wonderful rendition of "Hard Times" by Mavis Staples says it all for me. Buddy Miller, Steve Fishell and Matt Rollings back her up. The McGarrigle/Wainwright clan have a corner on the more traditional rendering that comes readily to mind, but our choristers gave it all they had and it was great in an arrangement by our own Bill Weber. Oh, you beautiful voices, how you break our hearts in joy.