LocaModa Founder Records Crowdsourced Song For Boston

April 26, 2013 by Dave Haynes

The digital signage and digital OOH community knows Stephen Randall as the acerbic founder of social media content integration company Locamoda, which is based in Boston.

Not as many know he’s also a musician and has been for years, even working as a professional songwriter earlier in his career.

So when the bombs went off in Boston recently, the transplanted Brit decided to pitch in through his music, writing and recording a song he hopes will help raise money for victim assistance. As you might expect, there are strong social and tech elements to the song, which is posted on SoundCloud.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/88789988″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

On Monday 15th, 2013, I went with my son Max aged 11, my daughter Scarlet aged 16 and my father who was visiting from London, to watch the Boston marathon runners run past my road in Wellesley.

The third Monday of April is one of my favorite days of the year – it marks the real start of Spring for me. The blossoms are just coming out, and we see neighbors and friends, eat BBQ food and cheer the spirit of thousands of runners.

Of course this year’s Boston marathon will be remembered for something else, namely the twin bombings near the finish line that killed three people and wounded more than 170.

This is a song written for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. The lyrics were inspired by the excellent speech given by President Obama at the interfaith healing service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, Thursday, April 18, 2013.

My vision for the song is that in the last choruses (the ones that start “We will stand…”), there are hundreds of voices all coming together to show their support. If anyone sends me a chorus of just their vocals (or lots of vocals), I’d like to add them to this track. To send me a vocal file, just leave a comment and post it to SC as private track with downloads enabled.

Who knows, maybe schools will sing this, maybe we can help the OneFund raise funds for the victims or at the very least, just show that a community of good people is always stronger than the few evil ones who grab the headlines.

In the words of the youngest fatality, 8-year-old Martin Richard, holding a poster he made after after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, “No more hurting people. Peace.”