I could easily have filled an entire piece just with peace-themed songs by Stevie Wonder. Co-written with Yvonne Wright, the sister of Wonder’s then-wife Syreeta (“With You I’m Born Again”), the song’s potent lyrics sadly are only more relevant today. I settled on “Evil” from “Music of My Mind” because it is less familiar and reflects a moment when Wonder was fully coming into his own artistically. There were so many Stevie Wonder songs that address the subject of universal love and tolerance that it was hard to choose one. Leaving room for darkness, where lost dreams can hide” “Evil, why have you engulfed so many hearts?Įvil, why have you destroyed so many minds? But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.” The song has been covered dozens of time and remains one of the most enduring anti-war songs of the last 50 years. According to the liner notes by Nat Hentoff, Dylan said, “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. This song was written in late-1962, when the writer was just 21, and included on the classic The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
It is only fitting to begin with a song by Bob Dylan who has addressed social protest themes for five decades.
I met another man who was wounded in hatredĪnd it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Bob Dylan (1963) We need to hear these songs now more than ever. Some songs may be familiar, but I hope many are new. These artists have made musical statements that go far beyond what I feel I can say in words right now. So in the somber spirit of the last few week, here is a list of 15 songs fine-tuned to the mood of the country. As I have struggled to find an appropriate way back to Stargayzing amidst this heightened atmosphere of anger, confusion, and pain, I realized the path must be musical. The usual topics of my blog have felt off and even a bit tone deaf, so I just didn’t post anything. In the days after a tragedy like Orlando, so many of us our grieving this has hit the LGBT community particularly hard. If Lennon were alive, I wonder what he might say about the world’s collective inability to heed the message of his music. In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono famously asked the world to “Give Peace a Chance” on the Plastic Ono Band’s seminal single (Lennon’s first solo release, by the way).
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