Ahead of the January 25th release of singer-songwriter Martyn Joseph’s new album, Here Come The Young, Glide’s Trevor Christian spoke with the songwriter and activist about the title track. In it, he celebrates young people for being “inclusive” and having “open minds and hearts.” He predicts they won’t continue to stand for “military threat,” “trickle down,” “racists leaders,” and “law ignored.” While reading the conversation it helps to know that Martyn is 58 and from Wales in the UK, while the interviewer is 26 and from New York.
Martyn, your single “Here Come The Young” sounds like this battle cry of a soldier in the trenches about to receive reinforcements on the scale of D-Day. And coincidentally, we’re also here to help you fight out of control nationalists. What gives you such hope for this upcoming generation?
I think the Brexit vote over here was a big shock for young people, some of whom couldn’t vote at the time. And when there was a snap election last year, everyone thought that the Conservative Party would landslide the thing. All these young people got up and voted for the first time and made quite a difference. I saw in them this optimism and this inclusiveness and they had a much broader version of life and humanity, I felt, than those who had the soundbites until then. And also at the same time in America, you had young armies of people beginning to take their voices seriously in terms of gun control after those shootings in Florida. So you had that big movement over there. And then as a father, I witnessed my own kids, who are now in their 20s, I’ve witnessed their lives up to this point, obviously. And I see in them that they’re more inclusive, they’re more open, they’re more loving, and they do not, in my opinion, have the baggage of my father’s generation.
I think life was such a struggle for generations before us just to make ends meet and the people had to be a little tougher. I don’t mean tougher in terms I know it’s tough to love sometimes, but I mean tougher in terms of they had to get out there and look after number one. But I think that we’re constantly adapting to our surroundings. People who have been born the last 20 years or so haven’t had to struggle quite so much, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But I think they’ve just been taught more tolerance, to have a moral backbone, to have empathy, to have compassion. I’m hopeful that the generation coming next will not make quite the catastrophic mistakes that my generation has made. That’s if they get the chance to do something about it in time, and I’m thinking of climate control.
I think that a lot of why we’re so different is the Internet and social media. I think the fact that I can so easily look at perspectives from such a diverse group of people. I’m certainly guilty of not really wanting to hear from the people with more bigoted or farther right-wing opinions. But I think the beauty has been that I can read the thoughts of smart people from so many different cultures and experiences with the click of a mouse. That hasn’t necessarily been the case in terms of mass media for generations before ours.
Absolutely. I was fortunate the guitar gave me the chance to travel the world and sit in some pretty uncomfortable situations sometimes where I was broken in two by the poverty that I saw. But it also broke me open as a person and made me empathetic and I’m grateful. I think you’re quite right. The chance to interact from our own living rooms with people on the other side of the planet and discover what life is like for others has played a large role in the empathy that I know I’m talking about
Exactly. In the 1980s, you being able to be exposed to so many different things was a rarity thanks to the travel you did and the industry you were in. That’s just not the exception to the rule anymore. Maybe we don’t all physically travel around that way, but exposure is not the exception anymore.
Yeah, although I still think it’s one thing to see it on the screen and it’s another thing to sit with it. One of the things we do at my foundation is we take people on volunteer trips. I take younger artists with me. We go to the West Bank in Palestine, for instance, and I expose songwriters to what’s going on over there in the hope that it might impact their writing and their artistry so they can tell the story in their way to their audience. If people have the opportunity to travel and sit in different situations, that’s goes such a long way to open our hearts and minds up to to the bigger world and the bigger picture.
Let me throw out two things that I guess sum up my feelings on young people in America at least. One is that if only people 18-25 voted in the 2016 election, 48 states would have gone Democrat, against Trump. His success was strongest with the over 65 crowd. The other thing sort of tempers my excitement. You mentioned the March for Our Live students. But the people who are doing those school shootings and the racially motivated church shooting and bombing campaign are, for the most part, also ‘the young.’ It seems as though my generation has started back up with this violent right-wing radicalism and cultivated this troll culture on the internet. I’m proud to say that’s not the majority, but there are issues and I’m not sure how they’re going to turn out.
When we talk in this way that there is a huge generalization, of course. Not every young person is going to be a saint or whatever, but for but I’m talking about a generality. You know there will always be hurt people in our society. I can guarantee that probably those young people who have caused mayhem with weapons. If we would look at their past, I’m sure they were let down primarily by the generation that went before them in some way. I don’t know and each individual is a story, obviously. But we will always have people who are not well, who have been treated badly, and therefore behave in a certain manner. The problem is that it’s their fathers, or — I was going to say their mothers, but probably their fathers — who have built an industry around weaponry and want it to survive. It’s the generation above them that allow them to have access to things that can be harmful.
And whilst that continues, I’m not going to just throw the blame just on one person who does some dreadfully violent things that you know are evil and shouldn’t have been done. There’s a much bigger picture here and that fall at the feet of young people, it falls at the feet of their elders who have perpetuated and created an environment where there’s access to those weapons so that their hurt and pain can be measured and using those dreadful things. These are tragic circumstances, but you’ll find in my country too that there are young people who’ve been abused and who’ve been through all sorts of breakups with parents or whatever it might be that that’s caused them to feel alienated and that they don’t fit. The difference is they don’t have access to automatic weapons. And therefore we have far less of what everyone has far less of apart from America. It’s just crazy.
You say we ‘might just save the day.’ What does it look like to you if we do save the day?
I’m certainly not saying that there will be some sort of utopia once this next generation comes along. But we certainly won’t have the likes of Trump and we won’t have that narrow-minded bigotry, racism, sexism. I mean for my father’s generation, LGBT rights were not a priority. I can still remember the language in my house that I didn’t like at the time but now it horrifies me. I grew up in a loving household but a fairly conservative political household and so I was told the way things were. And it took me a certain amount of traveling and thinking for myself to come to slightly different opinions about the world than my father, who I love very much. He has Alzheimer’s now. We’ve always been very close, but we had different politics.
It’s also an interesting philosophical question beyond that. If peace could reign and if we could all live in harmony and there was enough food to feed everyone and we sorted climate control and all of that stuff, there would be some fundamental questions as to who we are and why we’re here. But then again, young people are searching more, they’re more open to exploring ideas, they’re not so entrenched in their own social backgrounds that they won’t listen, they’ll sit down and discuss and talk more and be philosophical. I would like to think when they do get their say, the world will be a fairer place.
In my concerts, I’m reminding people right now that the people who perpetuate fear as a way of gaining power, they want our cynicism. They want us to be scared of each other. They want us to put up walls and not talk to our neighbors. And so we need to be reminded about who we are who we really are, the best of us, the best that we can be. And so you know I try to remind people that the vast majority of people who walk this planet get up every day they try to walk in love and faith and do the right thing. It’s just that the people that grab the headlines every day that drag us down.
Trevor Christian hosts the radio show Country Pocket on Long Island’s WUSB 90.1 FM, which can be streamed at wusb.fm
