The World is On Fire
A sonic meditation for LA, My last album with Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few
What’s good everyone,
A blessed new year to you all. I pray that you’re finding peace amidst it all.
The world is on fire. My condolences to anyone here who has suffered personal lost in the California wildfires. To that end, my friend Alysia Nicole Harris (who has been a guest writer on Julian’s Note and has a fantastic Substack all her own) shared with me a voice memo of her singing. I was so moved by her wail, I instantly put some sounds around it and called it “Kyrie LA’s on Fire.”
The lyrics of this lamentation are a play on the Greek phrase “Kyrie Eleison,” which means “Lord, have mercy.” I have turned to that phrase routinely when witnessing tragedy or when seeking forgiveness. I am thankful that Alysia retrieved that for us now as we bear witness to another tragedy, one hastened by the unbridled avarice inducing climate change. Here’s what she says about our “creative response of solidarity.”
“This fire in LA is making me think of the lament that every person feels when their home is destroyed. It’s a feeling I felt watching the uprising in Cairo after I had lived there. That I felt on September 11 seeing the smoke rising from the pentagon. It’s the horror of seeing the Capitol stormed. Or Notre dame on fire. Not because they are important landmarks but because I walked there. My parents worked there. I bought groceries there. The feeling that something familiar is made alien. That you are powerless in a place you once felt free enough to not think about safety or impermanence or death. Fire and water doesn’t just assault matter. They assault memory.”
As Cali and the country reel, I’m reminded of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s masterpiece Braiding Sweetgrass. Her thesis is that we cannot only take from the earth; we must lovingly return to her too – hence braiding earth’s sweetgrass like women braid each other’s hair. May this time before the fire invite us all to consider how we need to return to the earth. She is crying out and will not be ignored.
The world is on fire – this not only speaks to LA but also to a record by that same name on which I played piano last year.