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All our communities have to make the effort to reach out to each other rather than waiting passively for gestures that may never be made. We need to write our stories and sing our songs together not necessarily in unison or in tune but in a way that makes space for all of us.
--
Opening address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association conference in Nadi, 6 September 2005

 

Ratu Joni Madraiwiwi

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I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. ... I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood.
I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.
And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think you've not any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.

 

Woody Guthrie

 

When I thought I was dying in rehab in 1994, 'I Won't back Down' was my mantra. It lifted my up out of the pain and made me fight through it. 'The Waiting'... summed up my life. We can't stand waiting, we rock 'n' roll men and women. Tom Petty's songs are like a great book that you revisit when you need help. His songs make me better.

 

Stevie Nicks

 

Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa
I keep singing them sad sad songs, y'all.
Sad songs is all I know.
I keep singing them sad sad songs, y'all.
Sad songs is all I know.
It has a sweet melody tonight
Anybody can sing it any old time.
What's in your heart puts you in a groove
And when you sing this song,
It'll make you're whole body move.

 

Otis Redding

 

The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it. He hopes to impose his particular vision and share it with others. And when the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don't write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

 

Anais Nin

 

Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to tell stories, but I never had the patience to sit down at a typewriter and write short stories or anything like that. I started writing songs as a way of communicating ideas the best way I could.

 

Rob Thomas