In september Laurens Reij and I started to organise a series of Singer/Songwriter events under the name Lakeside Stories in Theatre Het Park in Hoorn near Amsterdam.
The idea behind this initiative was to create a platform for Singer/Songwriters both local and national to present themselves in front of a live audience. We also try to promote collaboration between artists and set challenges for our local Singer-Songwriters. In November 2011 we decided to ask our Lakeside Stories audience to come up with a theme to present as a songwriting challenge to our local songwriters, who we gave one month to compose and perform a song around this topic. At first the Lakeside Stories audience felt a little intimidated at being asked to think up a theme for a song, however after a few editions and having seen and heard the results the following month, they also have become supportive for this type of challenge and collaboration.
In November during the first Challenge the audience remained silent when asked to come up with a theme. Then all of a sudden, our sound engineer at the time, Steve Phillips, shouted out “Wall Street”. In the following edition of Lakeside Stories we discovered that 3 separate songs had been written all entitled Wall Street by Laurens Reij, Steve Phillips and mysel and all very different. Now the Lakeside Stories Challenge is a permanent part of our monthly Lakeside Stories event.
This song is my Wall Street song which I have set around the financial crisis and the premise that Wall Street and organized capitalism in general is going to go bust sooner or later due to corporate greed and abuse of trust and power.