Here Comes the Hurricane

Here Comes the Hurricane

When I was a senior in college, I read an article about global warming in the New Yorker.  This was around 1996. One of the effects predicted by the article was that hurricanes would get stronger.  A couple of years later I was living in Louisville.  This was around the time that I wrote "Just Getting started", so read that post for more background. At any rate, Hurricane Mitch was at that point the deadliest hurricane in history and it killed thousands in Central America. I think the final number was 11,000 fatalities. You might not remember this, because Bill Clinton was being impeached.

I was in a strange place at that point in my life. I had been having strange vivid dreams. In one there was a crazy man in Pakistan that was about to start World War III. I also had cancer, and didn't know it yet.

So I was walking around with this sense of dread. That a powerful reckoning was on its way, and it was going to seriously shake things up.  So I wrote this song. Of course, the song isn't just about the effects of climate change, but in the third verse, it takes aim at the people who unleash that havoc knowingly.  In the second verse even the rich and powerful get swallowed up by the hurricane. They think they can control these powerful global forces, but the hurricane is bigger than them. By the third verse, I level the worst insult I possibly can (and here's where the English language fails, but rock and roll is able to deliver).

It's funny, because there's a Trump reference "Trump cards, body guards", because he seemed a perfect example of isolated shameless greed. It actually wasn't about him, but about the kind of person who carries around one of Trump's cards. A lot of people in New York thought he was a sleezebag.

At any rate, I first recorded this with the Money Shots. Bob Brockman came to help record this in Louisville along with a bunch of other songs. For a while it looked like I was going to have a lot of money behind my music. I had a Grammy winning producer in the studio with me. But the whole enterprise fell apart.

I ended up in New York (again), and ultimately playing with The Navigators. I took a song fragment that had never made its way into a song, and it became an intro for Phelim to sing. The idea was to create a quiet moment to make the rest of the song more jarring. While the two pieces weren't created as a whole they fit together perfectly.

We recorded it once for Meet the Navigators, and then we recorded it again with James Walsh at Treshold Studios. Later I recorded it again with Bob Brockman and another lineup of Navigators. Obviously, I felt the song was important, but apparently other people did too. We kept trying to put it out there, but not reaching the audience we needed to reach for the song to have an impact. I think a lot of people who have been following the climatastrophe feel the same way I do.

I grew up listening to music from the 60s, and I believed that music could be fun, sweet and also a call to change.  The music industry never really cared about revolution, but if the kids were buying records, they did. That changed when selling music began to follow the corporate playbook. If you tried to change the system, they reasoned, aren't trying to change our business model?  I suppose I could write a whole book on this, but I'll leave it there.