Free & Brave

Album: Paradise (2016)
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Songfacts®:

  • America is the "home of the free and the brave," but sometimes it doesn't feel that way to Con Brio frontman Ziek McCarter, whose father was shot and killed by police in 2011. Losing his dad inspired this song, which in the opening line mentions two others who were shot down: Trayvon Martin and Martin Luther King, Jr. You have to be brave enough to be free, he concludes.
  • In a Songfacts interview with Ziek McCarter, he said of this song: "The intention was to really process and create a positive momentum from a traumatic experience in my life. I wasn't really speaking to politics. It alludes to the nature of police brutality, as well as other things. Poverty. The way we process and consume foods. Certain themes that I was drawing upon in that song. Those were the things I was carrying during that time in my life. It was inspired by one personal, traumatic event."

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