As I’ve posted about before on this blog, Cannonball and I have both been increasingly disturbed by what seems to be a near total inability of so many people in our own industry to find the courage in ourselves to stand up and use our talents, our labour, and our voices to support Palestinian rights and liberation in this critical time – especially when our industry in particular – the entertainment industry – has so much blood of the innocent on its own hands.

So we’re both quite happy that a song of Cannonball’s is part of a recently released project that does exactly what we’ve been saying is to be done – Killing The Flowers Will Not Delay Spring, a benefit compilation by queer artists for the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, has now been released to the world, and it features a new acoustic recording – in my view, a contagiously fun interpretation – of Cannonball’s song “Henry Hudson” that was recorded in January 2024, with Cannonball’s fellow romantic punk artist and frequent collaborator France de Griessen on additional vocals. All proceeds from the sales of this compilation are going to the Freedom Theatre – so please support it and spread the word if you want to help!

If you’re in NYC this Sunday, be sure to drop by Purgatory, where there will be a release party for this compilation from 6-9pm, featuring an open mic and several featured performers who contributed songs to the project. It’s a free event, but be sure to enter the raffle if you have the means, because all proceeds from the raffle go to Operation Olive Branch.

Loosely coinciding with the release of this studio recording, the live debut of this new version of “Henry Hudson” with France de Griessen on vocals took place just a couple weeks ago, at the London date of Cannonball’s friend and fellow NY antifolk alumnus Adam Rivera’s recent US/UK tour, where Cannonball and France performed a surprise “mini-set” as a duo – this was France de Griessen’s London debut, and took place a couple days before Cannonball and France headed West to Somerset to record France’s upcoming solo album with Ben Turner at Axe & Trap Studios, which features Cannonball on guest vocals and instrumentation. Cannonball is also directing a film about the making of the new France de Griessen album, which marks his return to directing after a decade-long hiatus – though he’s written, starred in, and edited a number of music videos and short documentaries more recently.

Now Adam Rivera’s aforementioned US/UK tour was, by all accounts, a great success and a highly enjoyable series of performances from a unique and talented solo artist who continues to evolve and refine his work as a songwriter and performer, becoming more grounded with age while retaining a kind of life and passionate creative enthusiasm that ensures he’ll never become boring or irrelevant – rather, he’ll only become more interesting and exciting, especially if you appreciate the heartfelt, timeless pop culture references scattered throughout his work, reflecting his avid appreciation for everything from They Might Be Giants to the Star Wars franchise.

And speaking of Star Wars, Cannonball has insisted on numerous occasions that part of why he and Adam make for such a good pairing as a double bill, as they did in their recent Nottingham performance and the London date that followed, is that Adam is an Earth based artist who writes and sings powerful, emotional songs inspired by Star Wars, while Cannonball is an artist of undisclosed extraterrestrial origin who writes and sings powerful, emotional songs inspired by the wars on Earth that Star Wars was created to serve as an allegory for.

These wars on Earth are something Cannonball has only become more vocal about in his work as of late. After nearly blowing out his voice during a particularly fiery performance of “Ghosts! (We Have Always Been At War)” from his upcoming self-titled 32nd album at the aforementioned Nottingham outing – where he sang about the ongoing genocides against Palestinian, Congolese, and numerous other human beings, and how our commonly accepted narratives in the West still imply harmful false moral equivalences between these groups and those who seek to annihilate them – and how these false equivalences are then used to justify these continued attempts at annihilation – he proceeded to introduce a soul-stirring rendition of his song “Hoyt-Schermerhorn (and a Man with One Hand)” from his 2019 album Rhinoceros Crossing by explaining that this next song was “about the same thing, but in a completely different way” – this song, like much of Cannonball’s work, turns the concept of “political art” on its head by directing our focus to the immediate, the personal, the experiential, and the emotional – here, he wields the art of songwriting to weave together seemingly random and fleeting moments in our everyday lives that tell a profound story about the power and the beauty that persists even in the face of tragedy, among working people in the imperial core and all over the world, the vast majority of whom become disabled at some point in life as a result of the conditions we’re living under.

On a similar note – expanding outward from the “micro” into the “macro” once again – in today’s world, the struggle for Palestinian liberation – and more broadly, all indigenous liberation and resistance – and all forms of resistance to colonisation all over the world – is a crucial focal point in the broader struggle of humanity against White supremacy (and its equally evil twin sibling, capitalism – and, their even more horrible granddad patriarchy, who started it all) – the fight against the interwoven forces of White supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy is the fight of our lives, especially as the effects of climate change and related issues are leading to the rise in, and the dangerous activation of, eco-fascist and similar White supremacist movements around the world that seek to exploit racialised people and their resource-rich lands in the Global South as part of the rush for “green tech” (and often not-so-green tech as well) – while leaving those same people for dead in the hellish conditions of droughts, poverty, war, and other disasters that came about as a result of the White, colonial looting of those people and their lands, as the Western countries that primarily built our wealth and our societies on this violent theft become more and more violently racist and do everything we can to make sure no such people can find refuge or build any kind of life for themselves anywhere in the world. This rising tide of eco-fascism must be stopped, before it kills us all.

So we have a lot to be deeply worried about – and a lot to be deeply hopeful about – we’ve lived through times that are similar in some very instructive ways, and seen the power of collective action, including through music and other forms of art – in fact, this is why Cannonball and many of his peers began making music and art in the first place.

He explains:

“This fight has always been part of my work. Specifically, my opposition to White supremacy was born out of the dezionisation process we’ve talked about on the blog – this is the process that began when I was a kid and I saw what was happening in my community very quickly after the turn of the century, and why I became an artist in the first place – until late 2001, my plan had been to become a major league baseball player, a mathematician, an astronaut, and/or a gardener.

I became an artist to, in my own small way (and as so many others are doing), help create space for and facilitate collective healing and liberation. This started with a need to create space for healing from the trauma of the dramatic rise of racism in NYC after 9/11, which especially targeted Arab Americans.

Now we’re seeing something even more extreme and so eerily similar in the past 8 months since 10/7 – so we’re taking what we’ve learned over the past 20+ years and building on that to create whatever we’re called to in this time – always continuing to learn and evolve through these new times and experiences as we go on.

To create such a space requires that it be an anti-racist space – so anti-racism is an inherent aspect of my work that’s inseparable from what I do. I’d say that’s true of so many artists who were born in the 1980s and 90s in particular – and plenty of artists from other generations – especially in the underground.

And that’s why I was so specifically involved with and deeply rooted in underground culture, especially in NYC’s East Village, where the punk movement had been born in the 1970s, followed by antifolk in the early 80s, and any number of other groundbreaking, influential movements. This is a culture that was always about healing and liberation, as much as people sometimes try to downplay that side of it and claim it as something “apolitical” or even reactionary.

Much of the NYC scene was the opposite of punk – it was commercial, it was cowardly, it was oppressive, and it was often horribly racist. Finding spaces for the kind of work we do has always been difficult – and then, incredibly rewarding – it changed my life, really. It gave me a way of living in this world that doesn’t revolve around the 2 options offered to us by White society: “be an oppressor” or “engage in toothless acts of resistance that are persecuted by and/or appropriated into White supremacy” – which is such a harmful and depressing double bind, and it did absolutely nothing to prepare people for the times we’re living in, where White supremacy is, slowly but surely, being revealed to be both immoral and impractical.

And more broadly, there’s so much work to be done – we’re watching the continued acceleration of NYC’s descent into a fascist police state, which began decades ago and is, unfortunately, another thing we’re apparently big “innovators” in – as someone who grew up in NYC and has lived in multiple countries and toured in 3 different continents since I left, it’s undeniable – I’ve seen so many societies more recently beginning to use what went on in early 2000s NYC as a model for how to attempt this kind of dystopian nightmare in the 21st century.

So I hope we can at least put our horrible experiences to good use here and also become innovators in how to resist and fully dismantle fascism.”

With all that in mind, and given the current climate where “business as usual” is the last thing on anyone’s mind – Cannonball is primarily looking to donate his time to performing at events (and contributing to more artistic projects like this new benefit compilation!) that support humanitarian causes, including decolonisation and dezionisation, queer liberation, and anti-racism. You can head over to the Booking page for more information on how to make a request.

See you soon!
Kléo