I met Ian at Annie Ohayons music night at The Standard in NY and I immediately wanted to get him involved in TVP. I was there seeing The Two and Ian was opening so I went up after the show and asked him – he said yes straight away and that he knew a lot of the folks who had done episodes already. We made a plan to meet at his place where he had this amazing piano he has had since childhood. If you’ve been following the project you pretty much know that we ask artists to pass the message on with a song, sometimes it can mean tagging a friend who’s music comes to mind or just someone they’d want to pass it on to, or sometimes it’s the song that comes to mind because the lyrics or feeling of it just capture the message of the songs in Uganda that started this all – that idea of no matter what you’ve done, just come home – and sometimes it’s a mixture of all of these. Listening to Ian’s performance and those lyrics from Dawes in this context was really a powerful thing for me, it happens a bit with the project but this was a great example. Shooting at Ian’s place overlooking the East River and Brooklyn was a beautiful spot to capture this, a performance in the sky, but also that scenery so different than where this all started in northern Uganda in way seems to make clearer the absolute universality of the shared message, a shared sentiment of empathy and forgiveness. There’s a lot of focus on diversity out there, and difference is important, and so often obvious, but it is our commonalities that in many ways really bind us all together, remind us that we’re all in this together, and they’re always there if you look for them. Thank you to Ian for this and to Dawes.
— Anna