Songwriter raises awareness of social and environmental issues through music

 Martin Høybye is a singer and songwriter with a PhD in art-based research. He has been writing songs in collaboration with people in South Africa and elsewhere since 2018, engaging with experiences of living with climate change and the biodiversity crisis.

Jörgen Frederiksson, Svip.se

The album Songs in the Key of Collaboration, to be released on May 3rd, 2024 through Songcrafter Music, features ten songs all written with people who accepted Martin’s open invitation to co-write – regardless of previous experience in music. The album was produced by Dennis Ahlgren, and is part of the product Martin Høybye’s art and practice-based doctoral thesis “Songs in the Key of Collaboration: Engaging with Anthropocene moments through personal and collaborative songwriting” (Aarhus University, 2023).

You have released two singles from your upcoming album. Will there be more singles?

– The first single is called “End of the World,” and it is a self-composed song that has a form akin to 1960s protest songs. It is my tribute to Thunberg and Autumn Peltier, and by extension all youth climate activists. The second single, “Where the Water Was,” follows a similar theme, but was written in collaboration with Casper Ace in Cape Town. Even the video we made for that one we decided would be collaborative, and of course it was written in an environment very far away from my own part of the world, namely the southern tip of Africa. The third single out January 19^th, 2024, was also collaboratively written in Cape Town. And all in all, four singles are planned. The whole album contains 10 songs, and two of the songs are self-penned, and eight of the songs are written together with others. In the project as a whole I have written 35 songs.

And of course, you can’t put 35 songs on an album. Was it difficult to choose which ones to include?

– I had to choose at some point what would happen on the first album, and it actually had more to do with how the individual songs sounded when played next to each other. Then came the question of how to get a coherent album from the choice of 10 songs. So, that has been a curatorial decision to make as well.

I saw that you had released two albums in one year a few years ago, so is it possible that you can make two albums when you have so much material?

– It’s absolutely possible. Before starting this project, I had released seven albums in my own name, but this project breaks new ground. I made a very conscious decision during my PhD, in the sense that I brought my existing songwriting practice into the academy, by seeking to turn my personal songwriting approach into a research practice. I made a conscious decision to try to share what I know as an artist with others. So, it’s a step further than what you might call documentary songwriting, because it goes further than being in the field and listening to people’s stories and then going home and writing a song about it. I wanted to have the conversation in the field, but also write the song in the field with the people telling the story, to make them collaborators in as equal a way as possible, also in the composition of the music. So, there were several elements that I had to introduce to make that happen, including a melody game. But having said that, coming away with something like 35 songs from a research project is massive. That’s a lot of material. So, I definitely have a plan that this first record’s songs are volume one, and then there will be other stories shared on other albums.

But the songs for a possible second album, you haven’t recorded yet?

– I don’t have them planned for production and they are not scheduled for release yet. I know we will be recording in 2024. But I think time will tell when we’ll record the next co-writes.

OK, but when you work with different people, are they from all over the world on these eight songs?

– Yes, let’s consider that. On the songs chosen for this record, they are for instance from Cape Town and the Greater Cape Town area. Now, that’s a very broad designation, because the difference between rich and poor in Cape Town is perhaps the largest anywhere in the world. The people who are rich are so immensely rich. And the people who are poor are so poor that there are really few other places in the world where poverty is so condensed in one space. And it’s not that I was working with the super-rich, nor was I working with people who were dying of starvation. That’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that it was a long way, socially, from a better off neighborhood to the townships where people are living in poverty. The youth unemployment rate where I worked was 45 to 50%. So, these townships are heavily affected by poverty, crime, violence and have bleak prospects for young people. I worked for instance in a neighborhood called Vrygrond, right next to a very affluent neighborhood called Muizenberg. And what is very telling about Cape Town, that there is often only a few 100 meters between this almost desperate poverty and the prosperity that people have when they are well off in certain parts of the city. So, when I say I’ve worked with people in Cape Town, it’s really to say that there isn’t one type of Cape Town because it has to do with where you live and what your background is, what privileges you have. And these issues need to be navigated by someone like me who comes into that situation as a Scandinavian. Are there certain privileges that I enjoy because my background is white and middle-class? Definitely. An example of my privilege was the spatial mobility I had. One day I was working in Vrygrond township, and then I went from Vrygrond to have a quick lunch in Muizenberg, which is an exclusive neighborhood in comparison. And then I drove on to a very posh district in Constantia and wrote a song there. All in one day. Most Capetonians still live their lives very separated. These people would normally never go to each other’s neighborhoods. And what’s interesting here is that I had that freedom. I enjoyed the freedom to both work in the poor neighborhood and in the very privileged environment on the same day. So, that tells you a lot about the considerable privilege of spatial mobility that I enjoyed, because of my background.

So, it’s like there’s an invisible wall between them?

– Actually, there are almost tangible walls, but you can’t necessarily see them. And that’s because Cape Town, of all cities in South Africa, is still the most racially segregated. Which has to do with Apartheid social engineering. And there is a spatial side to it that is still extremely apparent. You know, your life pretty much depends on which side you live of these lines, and, of course, many of these lines are color lines. It’s an eye opener to the ongoing legacy of a certain structural violence of the past which is still deeply rooted. It has definitely changed me as a person to work in these spaces. And so, that’s the South African side of it. It’s very diverse people from many different backgrounds, religious, skin color, political, from teenagers to retirees. But when I wrote songs in Denmark during the covid-19 pandemic, when it was impossible to travel and we had to stay within certain boundaries, people there were also from different places, nationalities, something which also happened in Cape Town now by the way. So, it’s not about songs being written with people from South Africa and Denmark because there are people living in those two places who came from other places. I worked with a Danish-Somali person during COVID-19 and also an Englishman, of course Danes and also a person from Malmö, Sweden. And now in Cape Town the same thing happened. When I thought I would work with the South African children, it turned out that one of them had a background from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in fact he was considered an immigrant. I have also worked with a woman from Ghana and a man from Zimbabwe and so on. So, it was really a very diverse group of people who responded to this open invitation to write a song with me. And I think it was a wonderful thing to experience. You get to know men, women, children, young people, young adults and adults and older people. And then from all these different social classes and cultural backgrounds it was still possible to mutually create a space of trust, where we could share our stories and find out what within those stories was the theme to work on that day. But before you get that far, you have to meet each other in a space of trust. With that established, you can find a positive energy towards wanting to create something of the two capacities that are in the room.

The song “Where the Water Was,” wants to make us realize that we are dependent on nature and should learn from the knowledge of previous generations and indigenous voices. I heard something this week, that the richest are the ones who don’t care much about nature and contribute the most to pollution. Did you see such differences in Cape Town?

– If I were to generalize a little bit, I think that can be true. The very rich have the advantage that they will always be able to move to another place or escape from a situation or invest in something for their own benefit. When you don’t have those options – like, when you are very dependent on what can come out of a day’s work, and if that day’s work involves a dependence on natural resources – then I think you get a better sense of, or a more connected sense of, what the natural resources actually mean to us as human beings. Whereas I think it’s easier to forget how important these resources are to us, if we’re not in touch with them on a daily basis. Now, water is a natural resource that we all depend on daily, to say the least. And the reason I went to Cape Town was primarily because there was a water crisis there. We do not have a water crisis as such, and will probably not have to worry about not having enough water for people in the Scandinavian countries. We might have to worry about the quality of our water, if it becomes too contaminated by some source that we have not been able to control. But the “Day Zero” water crisis, which they experienced in Cape Town in 2018-2019, and which I also experienced when I was there, was this up-close experience of running out of available drinking water for the big city. Normally we don’t hear so much about this, and perhaps think that it’s people living in rural areas that have a hard time finding water. But during the “Day Zero” water crisis, between 60 and 70% of 4 million people were affected. When you are in such an environment, something interesting happens. When the City says “you will run out of drinking water in three months,” then all of a sudden, whether you are rich or poor or whatever, the question of the natural resource becomes a very embodied feeling. What am I going to do when we run out of water in three months? So, it was the whole story about that I was looking at, and it’s interesting to keep looking into it for many reasons.

So, can we say that this album that you are releasing, is a bit of a wake-up call to us listeners. That we should take care of nature and learn from previous generations?

– It certainly seems to be the sentiment in the majority of the songs that people wanted to write. No matter how privileged or underprivileged they were, or where they were in their lives.

The songs were generally about their own experience of adversity or concern or whatever, but it didn’t stay as the only story. They often wanted that story to also tie into a universal and uplifting message, a reawakening to a connection between people in nature but also between people.

I think this is very important. And I hope that people also take away from the album that the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are caused by humans, but it will also be people who will solve them. The future has to involve people coming together and solving them. And I think we as artists have a privilege, but also a responsibility. Because we have a format as songwriters – in songwriting we can help create artifacts that allow others to visit the places and the stories of the co-writers of the songs. And hear those stories in a musical way and maybe take in their perspective. And what hopefully happens is, that towards the new culture we all have to move towards – because there will be a new culture and a new balance between humans and nature – every time we hear and take in a different perspective, we can perhaps find new footing on our journey. I think that’s the long and short of what songwriting, when taken to this kind of task, can hopefully do or enable.

And what about your own musical background? Do you have parents who were musicians?

– I grew up with music in the sense that my mother liked to sing, and she liked to sing mostly black music. Her favorite was Louis Armstrong, but there were many others that I grew up listening to, and I also listened to folk songs. It wasn’t that she was performing or anything like that. It’s just that she liked to sing, and there’s something about the American song tradition that was crucial to the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s in the US that influenced the whole musical landscape. From Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and then came Dylan and then later Springsteen and then Tracy Chapman. But when I grew up, it would be songs like spirituals, maybe “Swing low, Sweet Chariot,“ and it would be songs like Dylan’s “Blowin in the Wind.” That’s the stuff I grew up with, but I don’t think it was necessarily just due to my household. These songs were also sung and played at school. It was quite normal at morning assemblies to sing a few songs and one of the teachers played acoustic guitar, and everyone would try to sing in tune at the same time. And as I recall, many of those songs were topical songs in the sense that they had a message. They were related to what was going on in the world, and that was addressed in the song in one form or another.

For us kids, these songs were just pop songs also played on the radio. But, when you look at the deeper message of something like “Blowing in the Wind” or “Universal Soldier,” which you don’t start with as a child of course, but as you get older you realize the history that they are based on.

When we were dancing and enjoying “Buffalo Soldier,” or “No Woman, No Cry” and these kinds of songs, we loved these songs. But I think it’s only when I had grown up that I started to understand the pain and the necessity of the songwriting behind some of those songs. Bob Marley wrote his songs because they had to be written, and there is a deeper history of colonialism and slavery, a colonial context with power centers in Europe and the United States, which is behind it. I have to admit it helped me in the fieldwork as a songwriter that I grew up with the songs of the People’s Song Movement, and also the songs of Dylan, Springsteen, Trace Chapman just to name three.

It is a strong tradition to come from, because it is, as Harlan Howard said, about “3 chords and the truth.” And something happens in the room, when sharing songwriting as I have done, where the undertaking becomes very directed by the fact that we have to create this thing at the end of the meeting, a song that has to tell some kind of truth, and it should be held in a single song. Then it helped to trust that all we’d need would be 3 chords and the truth. And it really is that simple.

If I had come into those songwriting spaces and wanted to do jazz improvisation with people and asked them if we could somehow improvise how they felt about their adversity, it would have been a completely different project. So, I do think there is a deep connection between my personal musical past, and the fact that I have been able to write a PhD successfully on top of the work as well. It’s all because of the songs.

Besides the single releases and pending album, do you have more projects in the pipeline?

– Absolutely. Together with my partner Jan Thomsen in Malmö, I look forward to working on the “The New Songrise”.  With “The New Songrise” we aim to create positive change and upliftment through the power of songs and songwriting collaborations. So, in the end, my PhD and its songs are also the story of several concrete outcomes, besides the academic knowledge creation manifested in the thesis. I am first and foremost a practitioner, and I believe in the power of collaboration and tangible results. We will use the methods developed in the PhD to further many more collaborations to raise awareness about social and environmental issues, broadly speaking. It’s a project that involves a lot of “walking the talk.”