The Last Days of Cabrini-Green
New Music Out for the Audible Original Podcast
What’s good everyone,
Today I’m excited to share with you the music from the Audible Original “The Last Days of Cabrini-Green,” out now on streaming platforms. You can listen to the music here and the podcast here. The music scores a podcast of investigative journalism on the rise and fall of one of the US’ most notorious housing projects, Cabrini-Green, located in my beloved hometown Chicago. Though I did not grow up in this Near North Side housing complex, I grew up in the time of it and heard stories about folk who lived there and just how difficult life was for the Black folk who called that place home until it was torn down in the early 2000s. I was approached by the company Campside Media to create original music for it a few years ago and was grateful to see its release on Audible in November of last year.
In concert with my Chicago homies, I created three tracks: Main Theme, Ground Down, and Solemn. Main Theme (with Micah Collier and Wes Julien) underpins the docuseries. I wanted to tuck some hope into the sadness and sobriety of what happened to Cabrini-Green, because that’s how Black Chicago has always gotten down. The podcast, conceived and narrated by award-winning investigative journalist Ben Austen, toggles between the harrowing tragedy of Annette Freeman and her son Dantrell Davis and the skewering analysis of the systemic injustices that rankles Black and poor folk in Chicago then and still.
The song Ground Down (with Isaiah Collier, Micah Collier, and Wes Julien) speaks to the economic machine that ground down these people, akin to grinding down the buildings themselves in the demolition, akin to the grinding down of ashes for Ash Wednesday that the church just observed this past Wednesday. (“From dust we came and to dust we shall return.”) I give deep thanks for Isaiah Collier really do his thing here on tenor sax. He did not grow up in Cabrini-Green himself, but having grown up in Englewood on the South Side, I can hear in his playing the pathos that the podcast seeks to elicit about Cabrini. I hope you do too. (Behind the scenes: This was the one song I had to rewrite. The initial concept didn’t have enough repetition in it to signal the repetition of unjust economic policies and political machinations that would lead to the disintegration of the buildings and the life of Dantrell Davis.)
The third track is Solemn, written as a ballad for 7-year-old Dantrell who was killed by gun violence in 1992. His death sparked an uproar and led to the demolition of the projects.
They say it’s easier to write sad songs than happy. I think that’s halfway true. To be sure, it can be easy to put some minor chords together in a loop. But it is not easy to try to convey the way Blackness exceeds the death imposed on us, where we are not defined by it. The JuJu Exchange and my homie Verner helped me do that on this one.
My friend Rev. Dr. Nick Peterson (who I reference all the time in this newsletter because he’s a huge influence on my thinking) put it well once when he said that to love Black people is to be a funeral director. I think that gets it, and I think that sentiment is what I wanted to bring to Annette’s story about her son and what it means for us to attend to her and her son and to Cabrini-Green as a whole. Annette was core to the crafting of this project, and I am soberly thankful that she was. Black mothers have bared their pain for the world to see, just like Emmett Till’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley did with his open casket.
Will we listen to their pain and respond differently? That was at stake for me in writing Solemn. I didn’t want to just play sadness for the sake of folk spectating Black grief. I wanted Solemn to hold grief together with intimations of new life. I am trusting that to be the fruit of this podcast.
The music soundtrack released on Feb 28th, right at the meeting of Black History Month and Women’s history month. As we celebrate the women of our lives and our country, let us pay special attention to the Annette Freeman’s. Stories like Cabrini-Green’s should draw our attention to the travails and hope of Black women. We remember her son Dantrell. We remember Cabrini-Green.
As wars rage on against the Black and poor in Chicago and around the country, we ask God for mercy on our memories that we may step into the future differently, heeding the warnings.
abundantly,
Julian
What’s Next
Mar 7-8 Circle of Trust & Notes of Rest at Princeton Theological Seminary
Mar 6 The JuJu Exchange at Divan (Chicago)
Mar 12 The JuJu Exchange at Promontory (Chicago)
Mar 18 Notes of Rest at McCormick Theological Seminary (Chicago)
Mar 28 Notes of Rest at Yale Divinity School & Performing with Kevin Olusola (New Haven, CT)
Save the Dates:
May 3 An Ancient Flowing Stream: Black Contemplation Event with The Very Rev. Michael Battle, Ph.D. (virtual)
May 30-31 Inaugural Notes of Rest Retreat (Oregon, Illinois)
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Earth Day 2025 Resources: All Resources from Creation Justice Ministries (My two songs that I most directly helped co-write: Join the Trees in Praise & Praise)