Haiti has been the news lately because the big quake there was a year ago.
The Duvalier song (on Reha album) was written about Haitian history. Jean Claude

“The former ruler left Haiti in 1986 after a 15-year rule plagued by corruption and a crumbling economy.” After the quake Duvalier bizarrely pledged $8 million to the Red Cross.

He now lives in Paris and best estimates of his fortune are in the hundreds of millions – all suspected of being dishonestly obtained from the nation. Song lyrics for Duvalier are below with a player so you can listen to this song.

You took the money from my people
You took the bell from the steeple
You took my only hope away
Jean Claude Duvalier

And if greed were a virtue
I know that nothing would hurt you
If corruption were quaint
You’d be some kind of living saint

Duvalier Duvalier
you took the money and you ran away
Duvalier Duvalier
you took the money and you ran

Who was that beautiful lady
The one by your side
The one O so well dressed
The one you had to hide

Who was that beautiful lady
The queen of every shopping spree
Live a life of luxury back in gay Paree

Duvalier Duvalier
you took the money and you ran away
Duvalier Duvalier
You took it back to France

Now that suffering has come to you
And you’re scraping for a franc or two
When you know just what to do
I guess you’ll turn around

You took the money from my people
You took the bell from the steeple
You took my only hope away
Jean Claude Duvalier

Jean Claude Duvalier
Jean Claude Duvalier

For more background on Duvalier go here.

“Thought constitutes man’s greatness”

Blaise Pascal: 17th century philosopher and mathematician.

I stumbled across pascal from my reading of quotation books.

Reading quotations is a good way to trigger ideas for songs. Pascal writes about how man is a reed…

A seemingly weak thing in nature

and yet
he is great thru his capacity to think
and it is this capacity
which gives him a valid place in an infinite universe
so that there is a counterbalance to extreme alienation.
The capacity to think
softens the blow of the outside vastness
by offering us a vast universe inside also!
a taste of some of his insights.

“Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, while the contrary is quite common”.
Voila!
explains how: a hamburger chain can take over the world!
“Atheists should say things that are perfectly clear
Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material”
Bingo!
No one can prove the soul to be material!
Pascal draws attention to the hidden nature of God ” “this is the
very name which he gives himself in scripture “Deus absconditus”

(hidden God) “He will only be perceived by those who seek him with all
their whole heart”

Love the urgency with which he implores us to think about our fate

“The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to
us,affecting us so deeply,that one must have lost all feeling not to
care about knowing the facts of the matter”

Such thoughts as these gave me the inspiration to write “Pascal’s Song” at a time when my marriage was over and the family was broken and my only hope was in the “the beyond” . Such a vast and imponderable condition and it was explored to the max.

Positively lived and breathed alienation for years and that is how “High Risk” was born. No pictures on the cover (good policy) and a bunch of songs about the vastness within and the vastness without.

There is a third verse that never got sung on this track……the lyrics go like this

“The universe could crush us
And leave us for dead
Yet chooses to love us
And protect us instead
With a love so deep
And a love so wide
A kind of love
That can’t be defined”

Hope you have a nice day and thank you for taking an interest! Your thoughts please! Go Well
Luke