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Stream Now and help 'Plant Trees for Chimpanzees'
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This track highlights the impact of Climate Change. If we don't act now to reduce CO2 emissions, we are on track to cause the Mass Extinction of much of our planet’s wildlife. I wanted to try and do something positive.
So I have partnered with www.OneTreePlanted.org to ensure that every stream of this song will help to plant a tree. To be precise I hope that every ten streams of the song will fund the planting of a tree in Uganda. I am sponsoring a programme called "Planting Trees for Chimpanzees" which aims to plant 3m trees in the central belt of Uganda, to help restore some of the most important forest for Chimpanzees. I am making a sizable donation on top of all streaming revenue to help fund this program.
For more details of the Tree Planting Program Click Here
Planting trees alone will not get us anywhere near our net zero target by 2030-50. We still need to stop burning fossil fuels, transition to electric cars, and make other key changes to industrial and agricultural practices. But Trees are the lungs of the planet and as they lock up CO2, they can make an amazing contribution as part of our overall strategy to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
You only need to plant 100 trees in your lifetime to offset your personal carbon footprint! I felt this was a really positive way to show that we can all make a difference.*
NOTE*
The average human in the west creates 6 tonnes of CO2 per year. A tree can remove 50 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. So 100 new trees planted can in effect remove 83% of your carbon footprint. https://greenearthappeal.org/co2-verification/
The origins of the track….
I had been playing around with this groove on the drums for a while. It has a hypnotic driving feel, and it is a little unusual because there is no accent on the one, which gives it a kind of skip feel. I started playing this groove in a jam session with a good friend, James Eller (The The, Damien Saez, Nick Low, Julian Cope, et al). James is an amazing bass player and he came up with the bass groove which set the foundation for the track. I then added the rhodes and other synth parts and found some melodic hooks.
Whilst hunting for ideas for the lyrics I was listening to Greta Thunbergs inspirational speech to the 2019 UN Climate Summit and that gave me the idea for the narrative. Somehow the phrase ‘Changing’ came to mind, and I built the lyrics around this. It is clear that the planet is warming and there is overwhelming scientific evidence but we still have some high profile morons trying to deny it! Laughable but also very frightening!
So that was the basis for the track. “How can you deny it is changing, is it 1 degree or 5”? The Greta speech just fitted so perfectly as the backdrop to the track so I added that under the bridge section, and it just clicked!
Having written the words I sang the first demo version of the track, but my voice sounds like an asthmatic mule, so I asked a friend of mine Jodie Mellor, a super talented young singer from Bristol, to sing the lyrics. Let me give a super shout out to Jodie who is amazing!
Finally I want to thank Greta Thunberg for being so brave and standing up to be counted! She is an inspiration to us all.