Canadian singer-songwriter, AV (Ann Vriend) has unveiled a video for her newest single, “Everybody Matters”.
Inspired by her experience as a resident of Edmonton’s notorious inner-city neighborhood called McCauley, “Everybody Matters” draws the comparisons between what we say versus what we do when it comes to valuing human rights. With her front seat view of how the community around her is treated, AV began to write songs about her observations, leading to her creation of the song “Everybody Matters”.
The video for the track came about this past summer, as all spring and summer AV had been singing weekly concerts from her front porch, every Sunday. As the weeks passed, she added special guests who performed their own music— some from the neighborhood, and some not— and every week more and more neighbours and people from other parts of the city came out to watch. Many of the neighborhood residents found a sense of purpose and pride in helping host the shows and uniting the community, including with voluntarily helping to both set up and clean up after the shows. News crews began attending, people from outside of the neighbourhood, as well as a local MLA.
AV shares,
“The song is an energetic, old-school gospel/blues tune, with congregational clapping as the main rhythmic pulse throughout the song.The lyrics are a long list of contrasts between “first world” ideas of what”everybody matters” looks like: life support, cheap consumer goods made elsewhere, and rich people making headlines– versus what the rest of the world experiences : starvation, slave labor, little to no media attention. The observation Ann makes is if “everybody matters” certainly a greedy and classist society seems to say, well: “some a little more” (or a lot more). By the end of the song the lyrics admit that even those in “first world” countries feel the anxiety of this “need to get ahead, you can feel it to your core”– and leaves the listener wondering, alongside AV herself, if it is really possible to truly value human rights AND believe in the unquestioned, unchecked, unlimited greed of insatiable materialism.”
Check it out below, and stay up to date with AV via her socials.