This week’s Justice Notes is a departure. My daughter, Meredith Halas, is a musician and songwriter who posted the following on Facebook several years ago. I came across it again recently and was struck by how much of it speaks to the subjects I’ve been writing about here—choices, consequences, accountability, and how we decide to live our lives.
As someone who has spent these past years examining my own failures and the consequences of the choices I made, her words have particular meaning for me. There is something reassuring for a father in knowing that our children carry on, becoming their own people and arriving at their own understanding of how a life should be lived.
I’m proud to share her words here.
TEN STATEMENTS FROM THE MUSE
Originally posted on Facebook, July 2020
10 years ago, Keith Saunders and I assembled a dream team of players and a killer list of songs by local writers to do something almost as strange as re-writing the 10 Commandments (which we also did). We made a record of covers by unknown songwriters and bands (some of whom are now not unknown).
Brendan Muldowney made it sound amazing but we wanted it to be special, we wanted it to be by and for our community so we only printed 200 copies and I have the few that remain in my closet in Nashville.
Today, on my birthday, because I love you all and I like giving presents more than getting them, we finally release these tracks to all the places where you can listen while you shelter at home or while you drive to do your essential business.
The many members of Saint Bernadette over the years were privileged to travel the country and visit nearly every American state. We stayed on floors, in luxury hotels, in seedy motels with bullet holes in the windows, in guest rooms of friends and strangers, in vacation cabins with river views, in the back of our van in the parking lots of Walmart.
We met every kind of person and when we led with our music, we were always treated like friends and family, so often by people who didn’t know us at all. We never went without anything.
Music is an industry—it has many stakeholders and there is much at stake at this terrible time when performing it live is an actual danger to our public health. I could not be more grateful to have experienced a musical life outside that industry and before this danger when I could move through the beautiful landscapes of this country, sharing my voice and feelings with my fellow citizens in a way that touched them and motivated them to invite me and the incredible musicians who were part of this band into their lives and homes.
I realize now that I didn’t actually re-write the 10 Commandments. I would never presume to command anyone to do anything. But what I did do was try to write 10 statements to keep in mind as truth as you make your own decisions of your own free will.
We don’t all have the same goals or the same understanding of what goals are possible, but these statements were given to me by the muse, the force, that wakes me up in the night or interrupts me in the shower or while I’m driving and gives me my songs, so I wrote them down.
I share them with you now along with these great songs, written by Jon Aley, J DiMenna, Alan Seabourne and Alfredo Fappiano, No to Neurons, Tim DeBenedetti, Jon Reid, Elisa Flynn, Chris Cavaliere, Jeff Gitelman, Geremy Jasper, and Dan Updike, Steve Lavalette, and Brian Finn.
Enjoy!
THE TEN STATEMENTS FROM THE MUSE
Live honorably.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
You might never be punished for what you do wrong.
You can borrow from your neighbor, as long as you give them a piece of the back end.
You can only change yourself.
Chaos and order exist always and simultaneously.
Your dishonesty is a waste of resources.
You realize few things are as good as they seem, right?
You can never change others.
You might never be rewarded for what you do right.
Justice Notes is an ongoing series examining incarceration, rehabilitation, storytelling, institutional power, and the lives that exist behind prison walls.
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