This week I had two gigs in Chicago, and I had planned on playing a song I wrote in February about drone strikes called "Executive Order" -- but on Monday that all changed in an instant. I realized that my song was a bit graphic and the imagery it conveys was too close to what had just happened in Boston on that day, April 15th, when two brothers deployed terrible bombs at the finish line at the marathon.
In trying figure out what I was going to play in its place, I ended up writing down lyrics on Monday night to a song I wrote called "Brave in Boston" -- I ended up using some simple music, and played the first version of it the next day in Chicago at Uncommon Ground on Clark as part of the Chicago Songwriter Alliance. The song conveys the transformation that took place for so many people in those very shocking moments when a time of celebration turned to a time of tragic consequence and terror.
Over the following days I tweaked the song a bit, and ended up playing a version of it on Friday night at the Heartland Cafe (I opened for Cleveland songwriter Charlie Mosbrook) -- moments before I started my set that night news came that the second suspect had been captured alive. On Saturday I revised it again and recorded it on a handhelp MP3 recorder at home and posted it to SoundCloud.
You can hear a demo of my song about the 2013 Boston Marathon here: https://soundcloud.com/simeonpeebler/brave-in-boston