Award-winning songwriter and performer, Ian Sherwood is coming to terms with his own colonial roots and inviting us to do the same with his latest single. “Taking Your Land” is Sherwood opening up a conversation about our collective role in our shared past and future, particularly as a nation.
As Sherwood points out, the pandemic has been a strange time for us all. It’s thrown off our schedules, our lives, rearranged priorities and brought many long-simmering issues to a boil—or if they were already boiling, it certainly brought them to the forefront of our attention. Clearly, while many scenarios were exacerbated, it also gave us a back-handed blessing with the time to seriously reflect on them and the roles we play within them.
“Early on I took time away from music to focus on my family, some renovations around the house and to pay closer attention the what was being said around me,” explains Sherwood. “In a short period of time, we all experienced a major shift in our lives, loss of work, a mass killing in Nova Scotia, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement…”
“My need to get in front of an audience and bleed my heart out vanished.”
Sherwood says he hasn’t been alone in this lapse and spent a good deal of time reflecting on it and speaking with friends who had experienced something similar. Rather than forcing the issue, he chose to wait for the must to come to him and when it did, it came in the form of one very prevalent issue. Sherwoods spells out pretty explicitly the injustice for which we collectively owe a debt.
“In fall 2020 I found myself around a campfire with three of my white male friends and the conversation turned to our privilege, what it meant, how we got it, at whose expense, etc. We were all having the same thoughts, and asking the same questions; things that maybe we hadn’t spent enough time really considering as much as we should have,” says Sherwood.
“Eventually, this song started coming out. Not all at once. Pretty slowly, actually. There’s even a part of the chorus that I started writing before the pandemic while I was in Australia and hearing a radio program about indigenous reclamation in that country.
“As the song started to take form it was clear that I needed to do something with it. I wasn’t ready for a full record, and I didn’t want to benefit financially from it, so the idea of releasing it as a single and donating the profits seemed fitting to me.”
Produced by Chris Kirby, Atlantic Canada’s Chief R&B Office, can be heard performing on keyboard and banjo, while the songs also features Geoff Arsenault on drums, Ronald Joseph Hynes on bass, of course, Ian Sherwood on vocals and guitar.
“The production Chris put on it and the addition of Geoff Arsenault and Ron Hynes playing really helped bring the song to next level. I’d love to say that it’s complete, but really, it’s just one of the first steps in a long journey,” says Sherwood.
Sherwood will be donated all the profits from “Take Your Land” to I Love First Peoples; a charity designed to empower Indigenous children and youth to succeed through education and the motivation to stay in school.