Streets Are Burnin
Streets Are Burnin'
This is a song I wrote with my friends Jim Casey and his brother Danny Casey right after the killing of George Floyd. We were all broken up about it and Danny was inspired to write some lyrics. Jim got in touch with me and had a musical idea that was very sort of psychedelic Hendrix. I loved the lyrical idea, but I wasn’t feeling the musical direction. I went away with it for a couple of hours and took it in a completely different musical direction. I also changed up the lyrics significantly. As I began to work with it, my feelings went beyond George Floyd and to the treatment of African-Americans in general, and how that egregious treatment has been going on for way too long. As much “progress“ has been made in terms of civil rights, racism hasn’t gone away. The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer, something that has happened far too frequently over the years, just felt like yet another breaking point in a long line of breaking points. I cried a lot when I was working on this song. I’m not black, so I can’t pretend to know what it feels like to go through what they’ve gone through as a race, but I can certainly empathize with another human being who has been gravely mistreated and was unjustly killed.
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