ROOTS:
I write songs for participation, not performance: We sing because the singing changes us. So this song is meant to be sung in community, all the layers stacking up in a big group together, to remind us of the world we’re building for each other and bake it into our bones.

My family lives and works on unceded Dakota land, also known as Minneapolis. We arrived here with two small children in tow and were greeted by the pandemic, followed by the murder of George Floyd, followed by the Uprising right in our neighborhood. And so we jumped in where we could try to be good followers, grateful to be in a city where the conversation and groundwork of abolition had been sown into the soil years before, where the mutual aid networks were robust, where the organizing ecosystem is flourishing. Our arrival year here was formative, and it’s sparked a lot of new music as we continue to work towards liberation here in community.

Story of the song:
“Are you a police abolitionist?” –This line belongs to Twin Cities interdisciplinary healing artist Sterling Miller; he asked this question to a character being built in a theatre exercise, and the exact rhythm and cadence of his words lodged into my brain and wouldn’t leave me alone. It was such a genuine question! This was the seed of the whole song, and pretty soon it started to sprout more layers….

“Personal, cultural, structural change” – These three are a braid: the three types of change continually wrap around each other, build off each other, and catalyze each other. We need all three of them for wholistic change, but we may major in different strands in different seasons of our lives, or find one lane to major our work and calling in while committing to being good followers in the others. My partner Peter pointed out that these match up with Johan Galtung’s triangles: Galtung is known as the father of Peace Studies, and he teaches a triangle with three dimensions of Conflict (or Violence): Direct/Personal, Cultural, and Structural, and how these are therefore the three spheres where we need to build peace proactively. Lately, I’ve also been thinking of these three as Personal, Cultural, and Structural Revolution…

“Growth, healing, and liberation/Liberate your imagination”-- These are all the things we’ll need to move towards if change is gonna happen– these are all choices we can make.. There are echoes of Walter Bruggeman’s work on Prophetic Imagination here too.

“Organize, organize, organize” – This layer is from the Poor People’s Campaign, adapted by Theomusicologist Charon Hribar. I’ve learned a ton from how and why the Poor People’s Campaign has woven music into every facet of its organizing work (and how if you can dance to it, people will stick around when you organize with joy.) I encourage you to download their excellent songbook, full of music that meets the needs of our movements in this moment: www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/arts-culture/we-rise-a-movement-songbook/
I’ve written new verses to zip in; try writing some of your own...


A tithe of money from my songleading work, including from this song, gets paid forward to support Makoce Ikikcupi, the Dakota land recovery project here in Minnesota, and direct mutual aid projects here in the Twin Cities.


(.....listen with the good headphones so the bass kicks in :)