Love & Kindness
words by Tom and Alan Sanderson, music by Tom Sanderson, Alan Sanderson and Chris MayThese days there’s so much isolation
Clouds of anger in the skies
Intolerance infects the masses
Obscures many people’s eyesLet’s have some love & kindness today
But you and I can make a difference
Share our light in this small space
Let’s lift a hand to every person
Despite our faith, ideals, or raceLet’s have some love & kindness today
Let’s put a stop to all this hatred
Hold all rude comments thrown online
Let’s choose safe outlets for frustration
Then we’ll all be feeling fineLet’s have some love & kindness today
I know this issue isn’t simple
Still, inaction fails our rights
When arguments are turned to violence
May we help to put things rightLet’s have some love & kindness today
Well, you can turn your lead to bullets
Or you can turn your lead to gold
You can have war if you pay the price
But love can’t be bought or sold
Do you really love your brother?
Can we all forgive each other?Let’s have some love & kindness today
Let’s open up our blindness today
It’s time to break our silence today
Let’s stop all of this violence todayTom Sanderson: vocals, organ, clavinet, drums
Alan Sanderson: vocals, guitars, bass
Tom’s Notes
My good friend Chris May and I made original music recordings during numerous weekends in High School. One song I had written was called “Madness I” which Chris helped me to record in on a four-track cassette recorder he bought just a couple months earlier (Before that we used two regular cassette decks and overdubbed everything – recording on one and then playing back on the other, repeated and repeated). This song contained a bleak, teenage social commentary lyric – quite dark. My best guess is that its heavy tone prompted an in-studio addendum with the beginnings of this upbeat number to lighten things up. I believe I gave Alan a compilation mix tape that contained this recording and Alan said at the time the added mini song was his favorite part – it reminded him of The Jackson 5.
Over the next few years Chris and I made a few versions of “Madness I” but this mini-song got truncated from the last two for reasons that escape me. Since Alan and I have been collaborating, I have wondered what would be some great music that we could team up to record and this song fragment came to mind. The chorus of “Love and Kindness” pretty much sums up what was the previous part of the mini-song. I added some music for verses and some new lyrics. Alan later made improvements on music and lyrics. The tone of the music but also the nation’s unrest prompted the direction of the words. I value peace, forgiveness, fairness and kindness and I want more of that in world right now.
The clavinet, organ and drums were sequenced on the Roland FA-06. I transferred the project to the Tascam DP-24SD where I added vocals and acoustic percussion (tambourine & shaker).
Alan’s Notes
I was super happy when Tom pulled this song out of the archive and dusted it off. His old 4-track version of it is one of my favorites of his early recordings. He also composed some timely new lyrics for this version, very appropriate for what our society needs today.
In early 2019 I spent a week in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. While running along the Schuylkill River near the end of that trip I had the words for a song take form in my head, and I wrote them down when I got back to the hotel. I don’t remember the melody I used for them at the time, but they fit so nicely with Tom’s words to this song that I dug them out and shared them, and they became the last verse.
Some people don’t believe in the power of love to change the world. The idea that kindness could make inroads on an otherwise intractable problem sounds as foolish as alchemy to these skeptics. But maybe they have never read the New Testament, where we learn that meekness is strength, forgiveness is power, and that love is the mightiest weapon of all.
My tracks were all recorded and the song was mixed and mastered in Ardour 5.12 on Linux Mint 19.3. The rhythm guitar is an Ibanez AM53 semi-hollow body, and the lead guitar is a Fender Telecaster. The guitar tracks use the FatFrog virtual guitar amplifier plugged in to the Guitarix cabinet emulator. The bass uses the Guitarix amp. Other plugins used in mixing and mastering include the Linux Studio Plugins compressors and limiters, Dragonfly Reverb, and Calf Studio Gear‘s 5-band EQ and Vintage Delay.
Artwork by Marisa Sanderson.
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