Jan. 1, 2019: "All I Really Wanted," by Matt Halvorson

Hello! This is the Rise Up Music Project for January 1, 2019. I’m Matt Halvorson, and my song for today is called “All I Really Wanted.”

This is exciting! This is our first episode, our first song, our first day and everything. The Rise Up Music Project is about using music and art and personal storytelling as pathways to change and levers for activism. So, I’m one of six musicians, then, who will each write one song each week in 2019 with that in mind. Along with a new guest every week, we’ll collectively have a new song being created and shared every day this year. Real people making art in real time as we go along all year long. We’ll share pieces of our perspective and parts of our soul, and hopefully we’ll find some shared understanding and come to know some things that we hadn’t expected.

So, like I said, this song is called “All I Really Wanted.” I didn’t actually write it this week, but it is the song I finished most recently, and it seemed like a good place for this project to start. And in keeping with that spirit of making this all happen as we go along, I did make this recording in this last week (with extra thanks to my brother, Jon Halvorson, for playing the guitar on this one), and it is actually 12:55 a.m. on January 1 right now. So, you know. It’s all happening.

“All I Really Wanted” is a song is about the experience of coming to understand that I don’t really know anything at all, which is a strange experience, but it’s also pretty liberating in its way. It’s also a song that expresses some of the anger I’ve felt at realizing, you know, that we are intentionally misled along the way. It’s harder and harder to ignore the feeling that much of what we take for granted was constructed to keep us fenced in. And I think it’s harder and harder not to wonder, which of these things that I’ve taken for granted in my life as being good have been less than that? Or not what they seemed? And then it’s even harder to try to express those kinds of ideas without sounding crazy, or super vague, which is what I’m doing right now. But expressing those kinds of ideas is what I’ll try to do this year, I guess. And that’s what I was trying to do with this song.

Remember that we’ll also have a new song tomorrow from Benjamin Gore, a new song the day after that from Louie Opatz, and a new one the day after that from Cee Goods, and then from Nic Masangkay on Saturday and Stacy Rene Erenberg on Sunday. And on Monday, my good friend Jozzie Ellison will be the Rise Up Music Project’s first guest songwriter. He’s a good man and a good musician, and I think you’ll like him, just like I think you’ll like this whole project.

It’s going to be a good year.

Thank you so much for listening, and thank you so much for sharing this project with the people in your life. Once again, I’m Matt Halvorson, this is the Rise Up Music Project at RiseUpMusic.org, and this is a brand new song called “All I Really Wanted.” I hope you like it.