Photo credit: Rod Arroyo
In 2022 I was able to play a yearly festival in Detroit which occurs the first weekend of December that extends throughout the entire Midtown business and arts district called Noel Night. Thousands of people come to Detroit and pop into stores and see various performances. It’s a fun free for all. I was to play solo and honestly wasn’t feeling too enthused about reworking old My Brightest Diamond material for solo interpretations. I knew that in the same amount of time it would take for a re-hash or re-arrange, I could write new songs, so I chose my drug of choice. The New.
For those deep divers of Substack, that journey of cram writing for Noel Night is tagged under “Album in a Month.” (Alas, an album never to be completed for reasons I will maybe tell you about another time…)
The venue assigned to me was the historic First Congregational Church which hosts in its basement an Underground Railroad Living Museum. Many elements collided as I was contemplating songs for this performance. I was thinking about my growing up a pastor’s kid, about how complicated it is for me to sing in churches, about my beloved evangelist grandfather, about what it means to righteously rebel and to answer to a higher law than the law of the land, which in the case of the Underground Railroad and laws of slavery meant that to do what was right, one had to engage in illegal activity. I wanted to honor the space of the church, to be respectful and to engage with the expectation many folks have to hear songs about sheep in the month of December. ha ha!
The song in the setlist which I imagined would precede the as-of-yet-unwritten “Black Sheep” was “Nevertheless” from The Blue Hour. I had written that tune with a descending bass lament that I thought I might ask the crowd sing and allow me to break the fourth wall and play with the audience, thus “Black Sheep” was born.
Here is my earliest writing demo, punched-n-spliced, ungracefully edited, and never intended to be shared, but … why not? For fun, you can see how the tune changed over time when you hear the final version TOMORROW! woo hoo!