Killing the Messenger

Here’s a playlist consisting of five videos of recording sessions in Hawai’i that were essentially the takes that led to the final tracks.

Following a tradition we established recording Strangers and Friends in 2019, three of us converged from three different continents on a farm on an occupied island to record an album with a local multi-instrumentalist/engineer, in this case the Big Island of Hawai’i, on Chet Gardiner’s coffee farm.

The songs we recorded mostly had never had any kind of band treatment, and mostly were written by me between 2020-2022.

The album opens with a trilogy of songs about the persecution of Australian journalist, Julian Assange, including the title track. The rest of the album meanders between hidden history and the present day. Beyond the initial trilogy, an album theme might be a tenuous proposition, besides the broad notion of songs about history and current events, but it seems very notable that we are singing about a journalist imprisoned for helping to expose US war crimes in Iraq, during a time of war, in a country with such a history of empire, and other songs on the album explore various aspects of that empire.