Ten Thousand Miles Away

Original Liner Notes

Ten Thousand Miles Away
David Rovics

September, 2009



Dear listener,

In terms of my creative endeavors I got fairly well sidetracked for a couple years with writing essays and children's songs, but the muse seems to have shifted its priorities back to writing songs, and just lately also poems. Actually some of the poems were written a couple years ago, originally as songs, but mostly I never used them until just recently realizing they're actually poems. Much of the material on this CD was written in the past year or so, and much of it dates back further than that but I never did much with it at the time. Some of this stuff was recorded in some primitive form at some point, but none of it has appeared on a CD til now.

I made this recording with Billy Oskay at Big Red Studios in scenic Corbett, Oregon, outside Portland. If you think the CD sounds especially good, that's Billy, he's amazing.

More about each of the songs below.

David

Travelodge

An anti-love song for a lonely hotel room.

In the Name of God

A song for Dr. George Tiller, assassinated May 31st, 2009. I read about it in the Guardian after arriving on a flight from London.

Song for the Eureka Stockade

A fabulous, true story and the defining moment of Australian labor history. There were people involved from 23 nations, actually, but 20 fit better in the chorus. Never trust a songwriter for accuracy of details...

Brad

A song for my friend Brad Will who was shot to death on October 27th, 2006 with a camera in his hand, filming for NYC Indymedia on the barricades in Oaxaca City.

Floating Down the River

Another poem for New Orleans.

Now That You're Gone

Fairly self-explanatory...

Berkshire Hills

Shays' Rebellion was a pivotal moment in US history. No sooner were the farmers back home at their farms in Massachusetts after fighting in the Continental Army for the revolution than their landlords (they were tenant farmers) demanded back rent. Many of their friends and comrades dead, their homes and farms being taken from them by the bourgeoisie, these indebted would-be war heroes rebelled, and as a result we got the Bill of Rights, among other things.

Atif and Sebastian

It's a somewhat complicated case which I tried to sum up in a poem (which I originally thought might be a song). Atif Rafay and Sebastian Burns are innocent men who have been in prison for many years already, for a crime they didn't commit.

Pirates of Somalia

There are many more fascinating and terrible details to the story than you'll find in this little ditty.

Lebanon (2006)

If you're gonna burn your bridges you might as well bomb them, too.

John Brown

Henry Ward Beecher was a well-known minister in New England, but was better known internationally as the designer of the state-of-the-art Sharps rifle. He'd ship his rifles out to the abolitionists in Kansas in wooden crates marked “Bibles.” Naturally his guns became known among John Brown and his ilk as “Beecher's Bibles.”

Luis Posada

Luis Posada Carriles is a mass murderer with quite a bit more innocent blood on his hands than your average member of Al Qaeda, but he's not in prison, he's a free man in Miami, one of the many rightwing Cuban terrorists who are beloved by the US government. Meanwhile the men known as the Cuban 5 and people like Ana Belen Montes are spending most or all of the rest of their lives in prison for nothing more than trying to defend Cuban sovereignty.

Guanajuato

A song for one of the hundreds of would-be Mexican immigrants who die of thirst on the US-Mexico border every year.

Free

I originally wrote this as a song but realized it works better as a poem. It's for Jeffrey Luers, and all the other good people who have had to suffer outrageously long prison sentences for politically-motivated property destruction (otherwise known as “eco-terrorism”).

East Tennessee

A friend in Tennessee sent this paragraph from a newspaper:

“In August 1968, $800,000 worth of machinery was blown up in Bell County Kentucky. One evening in December, four months later, just across the border in Campbell County Tennessee local saboteurs dynamited nearly one million dollars in machinery belonging to the Blue Diamond Coal Company, including a diesel shovel, a railroad car, two large drills, and several trucks and bulldozers. Sabotage on a smaller scale occurs frequently; steam shovels worth between $50,000 and $90,000 are often found demolished. Armor piercing bullets have been fired at working bulldozers during the day and gun battles with company guards are not unknown at night.”

...and I wrote this song.

Land of the Midnight Sun

A love song for Denmark.

I Know A Man

I sang at a rally for gay marriage in Sydney, Australia, and heard a moving speech by a man who's name I don't remember. I had not long before then, on the plane from San Francisco to Melbourne, watched the wonderful movie about Harvey Milk. I must admit I had previously had a bit of a disinterested feeling about the whole idea of gay marriage. After seeing Milk and attending this rally I realized my mistake. Gay marriage is actually, literally a life or death issue for a lot of people. I hope this song might help some people understand that a little better.

Santiago

36 years to the day before I made this recording, on September 11th, 1973, a CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende.

Song for Ginger Goodwin

Last summer I had the pleasure of singing at an event in northern Vancouver Island that happens every year in memory of a prominent local labor organizer who was killed by an agent of the state because he refused to fight in a bosses' war.

Song for Al Grierson

Al was a dear friend who I met at the Kerrville Folk Festival in 1997 and visited every time I made it to the Texas hill country after that, up until he suddenly died in a flash flood on the road home from a gig. I wrote this song while driving around the Texas hill country around the time of Camp Casey, listening to a CD of Al's and thinking about him and his often brilliant way with words.

World of Broken Dreams

A love song.



Ten Thousand Miles Away

Travelodge 2:07
In the Name of God 2:50
Song for the Eureka Stockade 3:33
Brad 3:14
Floating Down the River 2:28
Now That You're Gone 2:48
Berkshire Hills 4:14
Atif and Sebastian 2:32
Pirates of Somalia 2:43
Lebanon (2006) 2:23
John Brown 4:05
Luis Posada 1:31
Guanajuato 3:41
Free 1:31
East Tennessee 3:09
Land of the Midnight Sun 2:29
I Know a Man 2:28
Santiago 2:52
Song for Ginger Goodwin 3:47
Song for Al Grierson 3:43
World of Broken Dreams 3:16