“His soul goes marching on…”
-“John Brown’s Body”, American Folk Song
HI, HOW ARE YOU?
Today is the musician and artist Daniel Johnston’s birthday and the official day for the “Hi, How Are You?” Project! My father has written about Daniel before in his blog, Daniel is a person who lived with serious mental illness and was also a huge influence on myself and my own artwork and music. I was lucky enough to see him in person, before he died on September 11th, 2019.
I am taking over the blog on this website from my father, who wrote about our struggles with serious mental illness in his book, CRAZY, which many of you are familiar. My name is Kevin “Earthday Earleybird” Earley, and despite living with serious mental illness, which I take medication for daily, I am a musician and artist in my own right.
During the day, I work as a peer support specialist for Arlington County, Virginia, and music is something I do in my spare time. My story was also recently told in the Ken Burns’ produced documentary, HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT – Youth Mental Illness, for which my involvement, (In addition to personal testimony interviews, I created artwork, music and lyrics for the film) I was invited to the White House.
THREE JOHNS
I figured the best way to introduce myself is through my music, so why not make this blog post the premiere of my new music video, “DEAR JOHN”, that I first wrote and recorded over a year ago and have had the ideas for the music video in my head since then. The song is a tribute to three men named John, who each changed the world and suffered tragic early demises. The three men are John Henry, John Brown, and John Lennon.
I got the idea last year, when I noticed that the songs “THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC”, “JESUS LOVES ME”, and “IMAGINE” are all in the key of C major. I originally thought of also including John the Baptist, John Lewis, John Denver, or John Coltrane, but in the interest of keeping a general theme, brevity and personal license, the song would be too long if I included their stories, so I narrowed it down to them.
I wanted to highlight the three Johns I ended up choosing because they all changed the world for better and died tragically. John Lennon was also killed by a man with serious mental illness, a fact not lost on me with my own mental health condition. I am lucky to have recovered from my illness, and not succumbed to the personal demons that might have lead me to attempt such a depraved and irreversible heinous act.
John Henry fought against the mechanical automation of labor, John Brown fought against the institution of enslavement and white supremacy, John Lennon fought against the industrial capitalist war machine and subsequently all three men paid for their actions with their lives. Each verse of the song honors one of these three men. The lives these three men lived gained immortality through their optimism and heroics, which transcend the tragedy of this world.
THE VIDEO SHOOT
For the beginning of the music video, I went to the Strawberry Fields IMAGINE Mosaic in Central Park, where they gather to honor John Lennon on the anniversary of his death every year. I stopped by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to capture footage of the two excellent John Brown paintings they have in their collection, John Steuart Curry’s “JOHN BROWN” and Thomas Hovenden’s “THE LAST MOMENTS OF JOHN BROWN”. My friend and college colleague, Jaemin Cuevas, who is also a talented filmmaker, was able to capture footage not only of the memorial in the park, but got some footage of me rapping my verse inside of a gazebo by a lake.
There are always a lot of logistics when filming a music video, especially one shot in public. I had a four hour window when I was in New York, and not only was I fortunate to have sunny weather, even if the temperature was frigid- as evidenced by my visible breath on the footage, but right when I arrived at the park I captured the opening footage of the crowd singing, “IMAGINE” which is my favorite song of John Lennon’s, and I didn’t hear them sing it at all the rest of the day I was there. There was definitely luck, serendipity, and bit of divine timing involved in that day’s shoot.
For the second location, I drove over four hours to Talcott, West Virginia, where the John Henry Memorial is located, with my crew of Brenden DiVernere and Nathan Zeledon, whom are both film students at George Mason University. We met my friend, professor Anthony Kwame Harrison, who teaches at Virginia Tech University. Also very serendipitous, the weather was calling for heavy rain all day, which I was afraid would ruin the shoot. However, we were lucky enough that once we arrived, it began to clear long enough to get footage for the video, then as we left, it began to rain again.
The third shooting location was in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, where John Brown famously staged his failed coup. My friend Dustin Burdette manned the camera for this shoot, he is a talented musician and videographer in his own right. I then gathered all of the footage and edited the video myself, after careful planning, drawing storyboards for the shoots and experiencing the luck we had with each particular shoot’s challenges. Unfortunately, not featured in the video is the vocalist who sings the chorus- Sofi Berro, who lives in Argentina, so logistically I wasn’t able to pull off having her in the video.
So this is the world premiere of the DEAR JOHN music video, and I hope you stick around to hear me blog about my thoughts on a variety of other topics. I hope to keep it current, relevant, and in the spirit of the blog my father started. Thank you!!!~~~
