“In a lot of ways, our part in The Voice Project started with Joe’s song “”Suitcase.”” Nine months earlier I’d been working at the camps and meeting with Women’s groups in Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan, after the women would teach me some of their songs, they would ask me to teach them some, and “”Suitcase”” was always the very first that came to mind. If you know the lyrics maybe it’s obvious why, but it’s a song I had loved for a long time and meeting with the women, listening to their lyrics and what they were singing about, in some ways Joe’s song took on a new meaning for me…but I wouldn’t say a “”whole”” new meaning as the essence of the original song to me, the quiet comforting, un-judging compassion in a private whisper, it’s intimacy is it’s universality.
To me it’s the essence of love and compassion for another human being. The women loved the song, adopted it as their own.
Chris and I saw Joe at the wedding of our good friend Oli Kraus, and and when Chris grabbed his computer to show Joe a little clip of the women in Uganda singing his song and we told him the story, with a tear coming down his faceo he said, “”whatever you need, the answer is forever yes.”” It’s the essence of the project, but also the essence of Joe and what he’s all about, not just as a musician but as a human being…
We shot this in his hotel room in LA, he was in town to play three sold out shows, and just a few hours later he said this from the stage at The Hotel Cafe:
I was in New York City for the wedding of a good friend, who happens to play a real good cello, and I was shown a video of a some women in this canyon in Uganda, singing a song of mine, all together and I cried like a baby, that’s what i did at that wedding. And it turns out that there’s an organization called The Voice Project, they’re trying to do everything they can to help these women who are trying to help themselves – they’ve got their husbands and their sons, they’ve had them taken away from them and forced into doing unspeakable acts in war. And these sons and husbands, they’re ashamed of what they’ve done and they think they can’t come home. These women, they’ve been singing to them, they’ve been making tapes and they’ve been sending them out into the field to let’em know that they’re forgiven, that they need’em. We found out that maybe we could help by singin too. We’re going to raise our voices to try and help them, and if you can, before you leave tonight, maybe ask somebody and find out what you can do to spread the word and help these beautiful, beautiful people.
A great part of this is having artists choose who and which song to cover, to see where it leads us, but also to see which artists or which songs they choose and why… it could be a friend they love, another band in their community (and the women have surely shown us how strong a force that can be…a community of individuals supporting each other through music and passing it on), the first song to come to their mind, or a song that relates directly to war or peace. Growing up in the South as Joe did you couldn’t have missed the influence of REM, their importance… something so positive, so amazing, so revolutionary for their time coming from a place we still too often associate with an old war. The choice of REM, and lyrically, Swan Swan H in particular, seemed to capture all of that in one cover.
Many many thanks to Joe, Katya and Brian Klein, these are people to love. — Hunter