We Are The Ones-It's About You (Obama Speech Remix)

I am in the midst of the exhilarating feeling of experiencing a dream of possibility on the cusp of being launched into the world. Hopefully this will inspire people everywhere to begin to believe that we as individuals and collectively can have an impact on healing our world. Each and every one of us has something to offer. In my own experience, there have been many times when I’ve neglected to follow through on what seemed at the time to be a brilliant idea. Perhaps it wasn’t received well, or it seemed too much of a struggle to push it forward. A week ago, I embraced the following possibility that was set before me. Here are the exact words from a middle of the night journal writing which describes the conception of the idea for the use of my song, “We Are The Ones”, and merging it with the energy of hope and promise I had heard in Barrack Obama’s speech two days before.

From Journal August 30th, 2008

Internal voices woke me up. They showed me “We Are The Ones”, with Obama’s speech interwoven as a viral video. There were pictures from the Democratic Convention especially emphasizing the “We”. I saw specific images for different parts of the song. “We are the hands” showed people waving the signs of change. For “We are the eyes” people were crying for hope and “We are the fire” depicted the fireworks coming out of the stadium. I heard the chorus “We Are The Ones” set to visuals of the huge stadium and the cheering. And the most moving part of Obama’s speech was set over the guitar solo. YES!!

The next morning I took sound bites from the speech and an audio version of the song and began to imagine how they would fit together. I began to search the web for compelling photos from the Democratic Convention. My partner Keith Ranney and I then went into his media studio where the video began to weave Obama’s inspirational and profound message with a song that describes how it really is up to us to create the world we want to live in. Barack Obama repeats, “It’s about you!”. My song resounds with, “We Are The Ones”. For the past several days Keith has been researching the tech side of how to get this information to the most people effectively, while I have continued my music gigs and employment as a substitute teacher.

We are going to launch the video on September 8th.