After the disaster songs project got recent local press coverage, Lloyd Allan MacPherson wrote to me to tell me about a song that he wrote not long before the Fukushima disaster in March 2011. Here’s his story in his own words:

Long story short, I had an ill-placed anxiety attack one evening, spent the better part of 9 months in a studio recording with an unknown local talent.

[I] did some experimental marketing during that time to put a feeler out for nuclear disarmament folk in the audiosphere – got a bite…continued to search for the video that told the story I was looking for, after 4 months found it with an independent film-maker in France (Rafael Chicha) and brokered the marriage of my single (Turn the Tide) to his video contribution to a UN video contest and we posted it on Youtube in February of 2011, one month prior to the Fukushima disaster.

The song was recorded at Smashbox Studios in Dominion over the course of many months in 2010.

At our peak, we were streaming around 21K hits [to this video] a month and [Mark Boutilier] was able to amass around 26K subscribers on his Youtube channel.  I guess that is a bit of a local success story too.

I was looking for a depiction of a nuclear fallout scenario with a reference to Japan, and a heavy indicator of unsound intelligence.  The lyrics of the song speak for themselves referring to a cataclysmic situation.

The song has been heralded (at the time) by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Global Zero, and certain Japanese press authorities (on Twitter somehow) who found it to be very prophetic (possibly without knowing the contents of the lyrics completely) in relation to the title of the song, the video content and the proximity of when it was published on Youtube.  I showed it to my friends at the Global Catholic Climate Movement and they found it to be exceptionally strange, hinging on a freakishly accurate account of what was about to happen.

The song can be heard here:

 

Standing in a different place, I can’t see but a reflected fate :
These four walls can’t surround me.
Looking for a different race.  Can we really keep this pace?
Has the norm, has it drowned me?

Survivors of consequence, this ain’t a deliverance.
And did you receive it?  I don’t think I got it man and I don’t want it until it’s time.
Victims of circumstance, we don’t get a second chance.
Do you believe this?  Would you have conceived this?
I think it’s time to turn the tide.

Staring down the same abyss, a desperate chance was missed
and now the time has come again.
Realize that it’s within your mind.  This animal called humankind
and we are begging, begging to be saved.

Endlessly drifting and timelessly shifting…
It’s time to turn the tide.

Survivors of consequence, this ain’t a deliverance.
And did you receive it.  I don’t think I got it man and I don’t want it until it’s time.
Victims of cirmcumstance, we don’t get a second chance.
Do you believe this?  Would you have conceived this?
I think it’s time to turn the tide.