Ian Axel » Dawes – Rest Easy
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...
Dawes » Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Carries On
Alex from Edward Sharpe was one of the first people Chris passed the story of the women in Uganda on to, and one of the first things he and the band did was offer to combine their record release...
Cillie Barnes » Dawes – Million Dollar Bill
I remember seeing those early TVP sessions with Dawes and then later us all talking about the different themes that we thought might run through the episodes, not just lyrically and stylistically, but the ideas of forgiveness, love, loss,...
Gulu Women’s Choir » Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home
Alex from Edward Sharpe was one of the first people Chris passed the story of the women in Uganda on to, and one of the first things he and the band did was offer to combine their record release...
Billy Bragg » Joanna Newsom – On a Good Day
This one’s kind of a great story; the ladies in Uganda had covered Joe Purdy’s “Suitcase,” then Joe covered REM, and then Mike Mills did Billy’s “Sing Their Souls Back Home.” Shortly afterwards Mike saw Billy at SXSW, told...
Mike Mills » Billy Bragg – Sing Their Souls Back Home
I have known Mike for a couple of years and have always been a fan of his music and the music of REM plus he is a lovely man. When I asked if he would be a part of...
Joe Purdy » REM – Swan Swan H
“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...
Going Forward
Pussy Riot was not an isolated case. Around the world, as protest have been growing, so has the crackdown on artists who use their voices to speak out for change. In the fight against oppression and injustice, the first...
Artists Under Siege
Increasingly, what we were seeing was that artists using their voices for dissent were being prosecuted with greater frequency and harsher punishments.
Using What We’ve Learned
As we'd seen in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, music can be an effective agent of conflict transformation. As Olivier Urbain, the author of "Music and Conflict Transformation" has written, "The real question is why...