Song for Alicia

from What of Our Nature

i came across the story of Alicia Rodriguez’s incarceration in an old book called Prisoners of Colonialism. she’s a Puerto Rican activist who spent 19 years as a political prisoner here in the US. today she runs a community arts space in Cayey, PR (here’s some more about her in her own words). what happened to her happened and is happening to a lot of people, and it didnt occur to me to write about her story until, one day, i found her making a rare appearance on the internet, reading a poem on facebook live (Boricua en la luna), and that same afternoon Haley happened to send me a Bob Dylan demo (Rambling, Gambling Willie), and i wrote this song right then. at first it felt too specific to share with anyone except for Alicia herself, and so i did, and it made its way onto our album with her blessing.