Considering the students I teach constantly privilege hip hop over everything else, I start thinking naturally about the structures and the creativity of these forms. One thing I especially enjoy is how community plays in the hip hop world. Often the subject artist invites other people to share lead vocals or their own rap within the singer’s song. I don’t come upon music journalists observing this or maybe I just missed it, but it is a cool feature and I am reminded of this design often while we explore different records in the courses I teach. Being an improviser, why not explore this myself? I wrote the song after reading details about Tammi Terrell’s life, the awesome Motown singer who died of a brain tumour at 25. Hard to read accounts of the violent and psychological abuse she got from James Brown and David Ruffin. The song paints what I thought about men who do damage to others and to themselves. Recordings are improvisations. Then I asked the poet Spencer Butt f he could create a rap as a bridge and I asked the first singer I ran into, someone at the open stage to sing the lead vocal. Will see where/ how it ends up.