David Rovics & Chet Gardiner

Prequel

Sometime in June of 2022, in response to the proxy war in Ukraine triggered by the Biden Regime's intransigence as a culmination of 30 years of increased provocation against Russia...

David Rovics wrote a song called At The End Of World War Three.

I was so impressed by that song that I recorded two versions of it and sent them to David.

The first was a guitar and vocal only version.

Then I recorded a FULL band treatment of the song that includes the sounds of World War Three under the long instrumental break.

As a result, David and I have collaborated in the creation of FIVE albums of music starting with Killing The Messenger recorded here on my farm in Hawai'i in January of 2023.

You can listen to Killing The Messenger here and the subsequent four albums can be found on the David and Chet Albums page

Killing the Messenger

Following a tradition we established recording Strangers and Friends in 2019, three of us converged from three different continents on a farm on an occupied island to record an album with a local multi-instrumentalist/engineer, in this case the Big Island of Hawai’i, on Chet Gardiner’s coffee farm.

The songs we recorded mostly had never had any kind of band treatment, and mostly were written by me between 2020-2022.

The album opens with a trilogy of songs about the persecution of Australian journalist, Julian Assange, including the title track. The rest of the album meanders between hidden history and the present day. Beyond the initial trilogy, an album theme might be a tenuous proposition, besides the broad notion of songs about history and current events, but it seems very notable that we are singing about a journalist imprisoned for helping to expose US war crimes in Iraq, during a time of war, in a country with such a history of empire, and other songs on the album explore various aspects of that empire.
credits

released March 19, 2023

Those gorgeous harmonies are Lorna McKinnon, from Scotland, and Kamala Emanuel, from Australia.

Chet Gardiner — from Hawai’i, where we recorded everything in the last half of January, 2023 — also adds some harmonies occasionally, and lots of guitars, basses, synthesizer, and engineering magic.

Solomon Choo is the one playing harmonica on several of the tracks.

I sang and played cello and irish bouzouki.

Billy Oskay had all kinds of useful input on the project, though he didn’t end up contributing to this one musically.

Cover art by the brilliant Eric Drooker.