Photo of Annabelle Chvostek by Heather Pollock
Canadian singer-songwriter Annabelle Chvostek wants to change the world, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she can see that the world is changing.
She has a great new album out this month called Rise which I reviewed for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’. The best songs on it are inspired by the Occupy Movement. In her online journal she writes :
“Stripping away the unnecessary means staying tuned to the beauty and the potential in the small things, gathering the rage, the love and the uncertainty together and making our little lives work. We have agency. We have power. In our tiny daily actions we are part of something huge”.
The music she makes is every bit as inspiring as these words. Original songs plus a killer version of Peter Tosh’s Equal Rights. You can get a flavour of the album by watching this video of her singing the opening track, End of the Road :
It’s a measure of how unpolitical most American blockbusters are that this movie practically counts as a radical drama. It begins with archive footage of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and this left-wing group’s vain attempts to counter injustice, greed and warmongering in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Weathermen’s opposition to US military involvement in Vietnam was such a central part of their protest that it all but fizzled out when the war ended.
