"My Religion (Sweet Love)"

Hip-hop lyric written by Atoaji radellant
Additional melody and parts, BNC

My religion~I am a Hindu-Buddhist-Jew-Islamic-Christian
Combining one soul, one vision~Living peacefully where music is the only divinity
And sharing your art, the sacred creed~My confession of faith
is to struggle, go out of my way~And find love to the end of my days

I'll reach a higher understanding coming out of confusion from
Chaos to cosmos the center it unfolds Revealing the sacred
for all those to behold~The creation of a world of my own
all alone
Navigated by the four seasons~And artistic expression~transcending the mundane to a Spiritual plane where the revelation to make music
first came
The microphone my symbol of faith~it seems strange~My words
amplified across dessert terrain to where You and yours reside to
take blame
For thoughts mesmerising your mind with no shame~It's unorthodox the paradox of Finding religion in music through hip hop~dancing I pop-lock~Letting my light shine~manifesting the glory within
at the same time~For the love of music
I am consciously devoted
Practice over theory the philosophy in motion just a token
From sacred scriptures~to be written from the prophet
Sharing my thoughts on all topics from the supernatural~ to exotic
Over sequenced patterns of music prolific
words are prolific

This song was originally a hip hop styled poem that I heard several years back when I went to hear my son Ernest's final grade concert at his college. The night after Ernest's concert we all went to hear Ato do his concert. This tall beautiful talented young man topped off his set with this spoken word hip hop poem "My Religion" and it totally knocked me over. I had no idea how in the world I could pull off doing a hip hop song....but I knew I was going to try. So I flew Ato down to Nashville and got some other young guns and set out to make this record. Needless to say it evolved through a lot of incarnations in the next year. I started building background vocals around it and even had a dream that I would somehow be able to do a "collage" of religions in the breakdown section. The magical fact that many of the songs overlapping just happened to be in the right key was another of many indications that I was stumbling along just fine making this crazy record and that surely there must be angels helping things line up!

Annie Roboff and David Leonard both played a key role in helping me to organize the layers of stuff that ended up on the track. I also had Matt Rollings come in a blast away on some Gospel piano and Annie layed down these great keyboard stabs. When Trina Shoemaker came in to mix she introduced me to color coding parts. What a relief! Thanks Trina!

To me the "voice" of this perspective in "My Religion" could be music itself. I think Ato has written an exceptional piece of poetry in this and I appreciate him letting this 51 year old folk singer take a stab at it!

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