For New York singer-songwriter, and acclaimed soul & blues vocalist, Sari Schorr, 2020 has not just kindled her creative fires as an artist, it’s inflamed them and lit a beacon.
Back in May, Sari re-released ‘Ordinary Life’: a single from her debut album ‘A Force of Nature’ (Manhaton Records, 2016). To this, she added her brand-new self-shot and edited video of New York under the COVID-19 lockdown, showing how ‘ordinary life’ had changed.
‘Ordinary Life’ resonated with many people around the world. On Facebook, the video reached 88,000 people, with 471 people sharing it. On YouTube, it has achieved 35,000 organic views.
Sari’s latest video adds new visuals to her 2018 song ‘The New Revolution’ (from her album ‘Never Say Never!’): a song written by Sari Schorr & Bob Fridzema.
The song was written to honour Martin Luther King, Jr. — America’s iconic advocate and champion of civil rights and nonviolence — one of the greatest nonviolent leaders in world history. At the heart of the song lies the line : “Seems like only yesterday, a bullet blew the dream away, coloured by hate.”
Watch the video and you’ll see archive and news footage of peaceful protests (past and present) get woven with Sari singing passionately in a caged space while background images of George Floyd, police and protests ghost in the background. Sari also sings, with passion and conviction, out in the open, in front of a rainbow in a dark grey sky. This year, the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement brought issues that Dr. King campaigned about back into the limelight. This inspired Sari Schorr to re-release ‘The New Revolution’ and to make a hard-hitting new video for it.
“I wrote the ‘The New Revolution’ to express the feeling I had that the world would soon be entering an era of great change,” Sari says, explaining what inspired the song in 2018, “In response to the message of racism and division that was being amplified by our president, I could imagine a growing movement that would embrace the fight for social justice.”
Now, in 2020, Sari adds, “That moment of change has finally come. The time has come to welcome a new age far beyond the grip of hatred and cruelty.”
Today, Martin Luther King’s message and example is as powerful, relevant and resonant as it has ever been: “Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.”
We must, says Sari!
