Thurs, Nov 25, 2021
Dartmouth-based, award-winning songwriter and performer, Ian Sherwood releases a new single today. “Taking Your Land” is a reckoning with Sherwood’s colonial roots and intended as an open conversation about our collective role in our shared past and future.
Profits of the song will be donated to I Love First Peoples; a charity designed to empower Indigenous children and youth to succeed through education and the motivation to stay in school.
“Taking Your Land” was produced by the capable and talented Chris Kirby and features Geoff Arsenault on drums, Ronald Joseph Hynes on bass, Chris Kirby on keyboards and banjo, and Ian Sherwood on vocals and guitar.
Ian says, “The pandemic has been a strange time for us all. Early on I took time away from music to focus on my family, some renovations around the house, and to pay closer attention the what was being said around me. In a short period of time, we all experienced a major shift in our lives, loss of work, a mass killing in Nova Scotia, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement… my need to get in front of an audience and bleed my heart out vanished. I spent a lot of time reflecting and talking to friends experiencing the same thing. I decided that I was going to wait until the music came back to me rather than force something out.
In fall 2020 I found myself around a campfire with three of my white male friends and the conversation turned to our privilege, what it meant, how we got it, at whose expense, etc. We were all having the same thoughts, and asking the same questions; things that maybe we hadn’t spent enough time really considering as much as we should have.
Eventually, this song started coming out. Not all at once. Pretty slowly, actually. There’s even a part of the chorus that I started writing before the pandemic while I was in Australia and hearing a radio program about indigenous reclamation in that country.
As the song started to take form, it was clear that I needed to do something with it. I wasn’t ready for a full record, and I didn’t want to benefit financially from it, so the idea of releasing it as a single and donating the profits seemed fitting to me.
The production Chris put on it and the addition of Geoff Arsenault and Ron Hynes playing really helped bring the song to the next level. I’d love to say that it’s complete, but really, it’s just one of the first steps in a long journey."
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For more information, please contact 321contact@iansherwood.com or visit www.iansherwood.com.
https://www.ilovefirstpeoples.ca