About This Item
For The Good Ones' new album, Rwanda, You Should Be Loved, bandleader Adrien Kazigira composed over forty songs. Most were meditations on his now thirteen-year-old daughter, Marie-Claire, and the life-threatening tumor that has afflicted her left-eye. The recording was done live without overdubs on Adrien's farm and was imbued with the passing of producer Ian Brennan's mother during the days that they were there together as well as a former founding band member recently having succumbed to his own demons. The Good Ones renown is evidenced by the stellar musicians who collaborated with them on the new album Wilco's Nels Cline, TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker, My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, and Fugazi's Joe Lally. In 2009, Grammy-winner Brennan (Tinariwen, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Zomba Prison Project) traveled to Rwanda in search of local music with his Italian-Rwandan wife, filmmaker and photographer, Marilena Delli. After two weeks of crisscrossing the country and listening to countless artists, they met The Good Ones.From the moment he laid eyes on them, Brennan said he knew, InchWhat these guys do is precious and rare. Don't F**k it up!InchBeginning in 1978 when they were still children, the group's core members were taught music by Janvier's older brother who was blind and later perished in the 1994 genocide. They formed the band as a healing process after the genocide and the original trio's membership reunited Rwanda's three tribes (with one member each from the Tutsi, Hutu, and Abatwa tribes). It was an active attempt to seek out Inchthe good ones,Inch after having endured and witnessed unthinkable horrors.Since they live without electricity and have had little access to devices to reproduce musical recordings, The Good Ones' vocalizations are based on the singing traditions and dialect of their local immediate, agricultural