the brief

A letter from mother earth to humanity . . .
not a good letter — you might say maw’s a tad ticked.

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I had come across Azul by Jesse Cook and put it on my youtube 'maybes' playlist by the early summer of 2019 and it became a regular part of my listening over that summer and into the fall. I could feel a song in there but that was it. There was no hint of the topic, no tease on the name, nothing.

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It was the 40th karosong to start channeling, the last of 7 in the the 3.2 set, and the 5th eco/poli-favour song.

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ah humanity . . .
you were always my favourite
and i know that's wrong but ask any mom
and she'll say there's always one

not more loved, but the one you
put your innermost hopes on
and with you i hoped for wisdom

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Emotional connection, title and subject were about all I actually got that first day, then nothing until after the Laos Chaos had dumped me back in my snow-bound Canadian living room some nine days later (give or take an International Date Line).

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Once started as an Ardour project, the flow and the message of the song clarified. It was an eco/poli karosong and it would be unflinching, a prequel in a sense to Along the old Silk Road 3.1 (which itself was a kind of sequel to Away is no longer there 2.3 ).

I generally find eco/poli songs the hardest to channel, in part from the difficult gamut of fear, despair, anger, and disillusion they invoke in me, and in another part from a (still crazy after all these years) residual journalistic habit that simply gets forced aside. Eco/poli does not equivocate.

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The song had another emotional difficulty for me. Mother earth. Mother. My late mother. My complicated relationship with her. Or lack of it. How she always put her own frustrated hopes on me. To be a doctor or a lawyer, things I did not want to be. Did not accept my choices to write and work in television. I could hear her voice in the lyrics.

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ah humanity, you had so much potential
you coulda been a . . .
you coulda been a . . .
but you became an investment banker

or something useless like that

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Under the double emotional whammy of eco/poli and the churn from that history with my mother, I started avoiding the song in my daily singing sessions. That lasted about a month while I worked on the other 3.2 songs.

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But — like the cat — the song came back. Dragging a still-squirming literary reference into the chorus no less.

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ah humanity . . .
your greed simply knows no bounds
and your cruelty even to your own
is simply unfathomable to me

it's as though some dark stain
has taken your soul
and now there's a monster
rages across the countryside

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After that, the song finished quickly. The resistance had disappeared. The 'message' became unequivocating. . .

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so that's why I'm here
to tell you you're on your own
the decisions you make 'going forward'
are about how you end

with a bang or whimper makes not a difference

with a million years of reset or so
we'll start over again. nothing personal
that's just the way it goes

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. . . but tinged with the deep anguish of an almost impossible choice.

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but just the same
no mother ever wants to abandon a child
but when it's one against all
the math simplifies

ah humanity. . .

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Funi-karo can turn up in the oddest places, and not always with much apparent grace or sense of the appropos. Check out the ending of this song, which came after most of the lyrics had solidified. It's so 'out there' it makes me chortle every time I do it.

but with a million years of reset or so
we'll start over again but this time
i don't think we should start
with a primate

no this time
i think we should start
with a . . .

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Post-script

This was also one of the first existing songs I worked on re-recording in the spring of 2021, to bring it into the whole/full karo vox. It transitioned into the new vox easily.