Since the first moment our Lost Voices journey began, every experience we’ve had with the kids has been absolutely amazing. Without exception, these young people have deeply inspired us with their talent. Every now and then, though, one of them stands out as the perfect storm of a kid who really needs to be making music.
We just finished a program with Samaritas, writing music via Zoom with teenage girls and boys living in decentralized foster group homes. The fact that we could even work with this sort of facility is one of the good things that has happened since the pandemic forced us to figure out how to make our program work remotely. In this program it came as a wonderful surprise to all of us to discover that one of the participants in this group was already a serious guitar player and songwriter. It’s the first time that’s happened in fourteen years of Lost Voices programs.
Now to be clear, many of our kids over the years have been talented singers or rappers, and some have even had a degree of instrumental ability. It’s just that, considering the turbulent lives most of these young people have led, it is apparently pretty rare that they have enough consistent access to really learn how to play a musical instrument.
So we were all a little bit surprised when this young woman picked up her guitar during the first session and favored us with a song she had recently written. It was a little ditty about COVID-19 that starts out:
I woke up this morning in a daze.
I had a dream that we were free
I had a dream that this was over,
Yet we’re still stuck in quarantine.
As she sang, I think all of the Lost Voices team members could see and hear a clear reflection of ourselves when we were teenagers, trying to figure out how to deal with barre chords and fingers blistered from steel guitar strings. We could all feel how important music is in her life.
As we worked our way through the week, she consistently stepped up with great musical ideas, and she was the only member of the small group who was willing to put her voice out front on the CD we were producing. We were lucky enough to have a staff member at the facility who had experience producing music, so we ended up in a marvelous virtual session with our young prodigy in an improvised recording studio, laying down vocal tracks through a pop filter into a scary-looking condenser microphone.
Here are the songs that came out of this remarkable week:
At one point our young songbird mentioned that she played the ukulele, but that she didn’t have one. It just so happens that I have a wonderful friend named Ben Hassenger, who heads up a nonprofit group called Music Is The Foundation established to fund music programs in area schools and the community. Ben was able to round up a concert-sized Ohana uke that we could give to her. I had the great pleasure of delivering that uke, along with her copies of the CD from the session, and I had the even greater pleasure of seeing the look on her face. It is possible that we will have the opportunity to work with this young woman again, and maybe this time we’ll get a uke song.
After the program, the wonderful team at Samaritas put this video together, highlighting her experience.
Folks, this Lost Voices journey just keeps getting better!
All Songs Copyright © 2020, Lost Voices and the Lost Voices Program Participants. All rights reserved.
