I'll Stand By You

Houdini

Magic Johnson

Los ojos de Dios (ROUGH CUT)

Los ojos de Dios v3

Only Half Black (sample)

This is for me…

This song was originally my response to an assignment for an upper level undergrad music theory class I took in 2019, while studying at Temple. We had to perform our pieces in front of the class, so I debuted it as nothing more than a piano ballad because that’s all it was meant to be (minus the bridgey part). I’d written this as my personal “f*** you” to academia—and, more specifically, to a very particular brand of stuck-upness, backstabbery, and other hurtful nesses and abberies that I had never experienced until university. Moving on, I meant the “movements” and “speeches” part to mean the “movements” of the classical/Baroque/mostly White European music forced on me during that time. Only after I wrote and unexpectedly recorded this song (another story) did it occur to me that these lyrics could be completely confused for/misinterpreted as me trashing the ongoing social justice moments in the world for things like police brutality, use of military force on civilians, institutional/beyond racism, and racial inequality, and the many speeches that these movements have borne. Plus, can you imagine, in the climate of 2019? And then after Covid hit??? Yeah, I woulda gotten murked. So, I never released it.

But now about 2 years have passed and I randomly listened to it (after not having done so for awhile) at my age now (26) and I was like, holy shit, this is a BOP! So I’m releasing it now, because I can and because I f****** loved and still love what my friend, fellow artist/musician/producer/everything Lukey, and I turned it into together. I don’t care if it’s misinterpreted anymore because I wrote it 100% for me and I know exactly wtf I meant, who I was addressing, and I know wtf I stand for and don’t stand for, and now I realize that that’s all that matters to me. 🤷🏽‍♀️💋

Enjoy x

Stephen Acosta

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