Local creates song for senate campaign
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Many open their checkbooks to support a candidate before elections but Matthew Marsolek of Arlee donated his talent. He was inspired as he stood in a crowd of people listening to Amanda Curtis campaign for the U.S. Senate. As a musician, he took that spark and recorded a song called “One of Us.”
“I’m kind of cynical about the process,” he said of politics. “But I heard about this campaign and I started to perk up, so I went to hear her speak.”
He said Curtis talked about her struggle with poverty, family members going to jail, her brother’s suicide and her aspiration to get to college. He said he felt like her struggle with poverty was common in Montana.
“I’m a lower income Montanan and I’m an artist. I’ve found a way to sustain myself, and I’m inspired by anyone representing the ordinary working class.”
He said Curtis did get to college.
“She has a science and math background,” he said. “We are facing scientific problems: climate change, water, disease. We need science-based thinking. We also need to empower women so it’s not just an old white man’s club. She is someone who relates to the common woman and man.”
After hearing the speech, he started thinking about ways he could help.
“What could I do?” he asked himself. “I don’t have a lot of money but I have energy I can give. I heard the crowd saying she is one of us. I thought I could work that into a song.”
The first thing he did was to research the campaign to get ideas for writing the lyrics, but he needed to work fast. The election was weeks away. He worked in Amanda’s history, views on the issues and the campaign trail.
“It took three days to record and edit the song,” he said. “In the song, it’s all me playing all the parts in this studio in Arlee.”
The parts to the song included singing the lyrics, playing the guitar and creating a drum beat.
“I consciously chose a folksy feel for Amanda,” he said looking at a wave form of the song on his computer, which is something that looks like a frozen picture of a reading from a heart rate monitor. He records the different instruments and puts them together on the computer.
Marsolek works with sounds from retro techno to classical for everything from independent films to a string quartet in a symphony. He spent much of his 49 years developing his skills with different instruments, but his favorite sound comes from a West African drum called the djembe. He layered that sound into the song for Amanda, but he usually plays the drum with a group called the Drum Brothers.
“It’s about the feel of the rhythm,” he said of the drum. “There is a swing to it. When you play it, suddenly you’re in a sweet, soulful place.”
Different sounds are created with the drum. The drum he used for the song was made in a workshop next to his recording studio at his home.
“There are three sounds. The bass is in the center. The tone is on the rim, and the slap makes a cracking sound. Those three sounds allow you to do complex patterns. This is a classical art form, not just a hippy on the corner beating a drum. In West Africa, they view drumming like we view Beethoven.”
He said the drum is traditional to West African but anyone can play it.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re Asian or Caucasian,” he said. “It’s about whether you can lose yourself in the music. It’s about getting into the flow. My teacher Abdoul Doumbia (from African) says to people ‘can you hang?’ What he means: can you go deep into the music?”
Marsolek posted “One of Us” on YouTube and received different reactions from viewers.
“I’ve had some really good responses,” he said. “Some don’t like it because it’s supporting a campaign they don’t like. I don’t like the vitriol of name calling. I prefer polite discourse. But the great thing about music is that it’ll stay in your head and it brings people together. I really just wanted to introduce people to some of Amada’s philosophies through music.”
The song can be heard at http://youtu.be/YN702-bHErc or www.drumbrothers.com/media/One-of-Us.mp3.
