The One | The Story Behind the Songs

For my EP The One, I wrote songs for the first time in my life.

Let me say, first of all, it was heartbreaking work. Exploring my story’s themes of childhood abuse and poverty, I often spilled out, along with words, tears.

NO SAFE PLACE

The first song I wrote was No Safe Place. As I began to write about growing up in North Miami, in a yellow house saturated with darkness, my mind began to flashback to my stepfather

-- Chasing our family, round and round the house, with a spear gun

-- Dragging me by the hair on our gravel driveway, bouncing me up the front steps of my home

-- Whispering to me, during bedtime: Don’t go to sleep tonight, you will wake up dead

-- Dunking repeatedly my six-year-old brother’s head in a toilet filled with excrement

In one vivid flashback, I saw myself as the eldest child, head on a pillow hiding a knife, charged with our survival, listening to music from a boombox deep into another night.

No Safe Place begins:

Young, alone and captive

In a place that saw no sun

Held my breath in every moment

Forced to hold my tongue

In looking back, what hollowed me was not so much my stepfather’s violence, but the belief that such diabolical abuse was the norm. In my childhood world, nothing was right or wrong.

The agony of songwriting empowered a redemptive catharsis. The song ends with the sound of a door closing, the haunting of the dark yellow house finally behind me.

I believe it might feel like waking up after being hypnotized.

STAND UP

Stand Up is the sequel to No Safe Place. Looking back at my childhood, I saw myself stretched out on the back window of our old Cadillac.

Light blue, the Cadillac had the power to transport us from

-- the shadows of hell home to a bright opal beach

-- a poverty of love to a horizon of endless beauty

— from the reality of abuse to Islamorada in the Florida Keys, Snorkeling till sunset

The old Cadillac took us to the places we lived for. Always streaming from the speakers was the music we shared and loved --

Signed Sealed Delivered

Band on the Run

Aja

Bohemian Rhapsody

Tell Me Something Good

-- keeping us alive.

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Stand Up is what I say to the little girl, staring at the stars, laying on the back window of the Cadillac parked beside the yellow house.

I’d tell myself- Hold on little girl

Things are gonna get rough

The time will come for your day in the sun

You’ll say enough’s enough

For the chorus, I recruited my family, so many fellow musicians familiar with suffering. In the recording, the joy we experienced singing together was far greater than the pain we will always share.

BACK TO THE ONE

Focused on encounters that helped me see the power of empathy, I wrote Back to the One as a recovery of the universal truth of the power of love.

And it all comes down to love

Gotta bring it back to the One

Cause it’s what we’re all made of

Gotta bring it back to the One

In the song, I tell three stories from my experience --

Watching Haitian refugees arrive on Miami Beach when I was 14

Treating a beaten and bloodied cross-dresser in my job as a nurse

Giving a few dollars to a mother trapped in poverty

-- that transformed my perspective on suffering.

As human beings, we share this broken planet together. Empathy connects us — back to the power of redemption, back to the one.

WHAT YOU WON’T DO FOR LOVE

The EP also includes a cover of Bobby Caldwell’s What You Won’t Do for Love:

Jazzy breezy R&B, the silky warm feel of sun on skin, the song playing on the radio of an old Cadillac bent on escaping to a Miami beach.