Life is our “common struggle” as eloquently put by late Seattle poet Steven “Jesse” Bernstein, whose poem Reasons You Can Understand we adapted into song.
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I (Eleni Binge) absolutely love his poems. This song, in particular, means a lot to me. Humanity just trying to hang on (or let go)…the difficult impossibility of just being.
Back in 1996 (!) I attended a memorial and book release at Seattle’s OK Hotel for Bernstein and his book More Noise, Please! The poems in the book—including the one we put to song—are compassionate, horrid, raw, emotional, reckless, and gorgeous.
With permission from his estate, we released this song using his poem.