Happy solstice friends. Life resolves in favor of family and purposeful work for the moment. 

Our daughter was born in the first weeks of the Covid pandemic. She’s nearly four now, a joyous challenge. 

At Public Citizen, our access to medicines group worked years on urgent footing, acutely aware people live or die depending on the scale of the global Covid response, which we had modest power and significant responsibility to influence. 

Today we are supporting pandemic response measures that share science and technology and advance health and justice. We are overcoming patent barriers and improving medicine affordability in the United States, Colombia and worldwide, and building a stronger access to medicines movement. 

I set music aside for a time, and will return to it soon. Please enjoy Pacifica until then. 

Discontents

singles_DiscontentsThese weeks, beyond the dramatics of the proposed border wall, Brazil inaugurated a president of even worse impulses, a man publicly nostalgic for the days recent in his country’s memory when one could simply torture the opposition. These are our discontents.   Read more

Failed States

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Here is “Failed States,” a new song of piano, talking drum and Gordon Withers’ cello we’ve just finished at Magpie Cage. The song’s story and double entendre refer to collapse in our societies and our relationships to each other. Read more.

All of Whom I Love

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Here is “All of Whom I Love,” a song I wrote in Hanoi, Viet Nam and have just recorded with Eamonn Aiken at The Bastille Studio in Arlington, Virginia. Kate Rears provides a cello quintet. I play nylon and steel string guitars, bass and percussion, including a West African talking drum, which changes pitch with pressure. We opted for an acoustic arrangement to fit the song’s character and lyrical geography.

Aloha TPP

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Several years’ work has brought us finally to the island of Maui. Twelve nations have sent ministers and delegations here to attempt to conclude negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The U.S. government, pressed by business lobbies and their election spending, will ask … Continue reading