Making Music to Save Our Libraries
I guess most if not all of you will have heard of the concern that the spending cuts being imposed by the government on local authorities are going to lead to the closure of a large number of public libraries in England. I think every right minded person in the country would consider this a bad thing. People are campaigning in a variety of ways to make sure that the decision makers know that people think this is a bad thing.
So against this background my friend Piers, who among his many talents is a fine singer and curator of traditional English songs, has written this song about some of the reasons why public libraries are so important and why we wouldn't want to have them closed down. A protest song in the traditional sense if you will.
Now the cool thing about this, apart from it being a great song and a good cause, is that Piers has licensed the song and the recording of it under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) so basically you can do anything non-commercial you want with it as long as you attribute the authors and apply the same license to any resulting work.
Now what I thought would be really great given all the above would be for a great diversity of musicians, producers DJs and other audio artists working in different genres to make their own version of the song in their own way, whether that be reworking the music and words to fit the way that they make music, or "remixing" Piers' original recording with the accompaniment of their choice, and then get that out to the people who listen to their music either as a live performance or a recording. A bit like a distributed charity record, but rather than a few mediocre pop celebrities getting together in a studio to drink champagne and have their picture taken while they make one record, there will be a large number of people producing multiple versions of the song in much the same way as they normally do and getting it to their audience in the same way as their other stuff. People are funny with music, they don't really listen to stuff they are unfamiliar with, however important the message. This way by rendering the song in a variety of different styles it becomes more accessible to a greater number of people, and by that more people get the message.
So get to it! Make your version, persuade your friends and relatives to make a version, persuade your favourite band to make a version.
The full original post with lyrics and guitar arrangement at http://www.bofh.org.uk/2011/02/08/save-our-libraries
Update
Piers has made an updated version against a click track, which should make this even more accessible for people to make a remix or use it in their own project:Child Of The Library (Revised) by pdcawley
Get to it :)
