This is Lost in Babylon, the latest single from the upcoming CD NARROW AND STEEP by San Franscisco based singer-songwriter Denny Brown. 

Every 2-3 weeks a new single will be released in a RANDOM ORDER, each with its own unique cover, leading up to a full digital release later in the year. In addition, we will be releasing a few short films, both unplugged performances as well as music videos.

"I am interested in timelesss music. Not nostalgia but a sound that defies to be part of a certain period. Music that is hard to pin down when it was first recorded. When a sound, a song structure, a melody feels both of the past and present, and when they melt into one another, it can be forever."
Denny Brown San Francisco 2015

Single #9 Lost In Babylon

Writing music is never an intentional process for me. I rarely sit down with the intention of writing music. Most of my writing is done as a reaction to something which can be a simple event or series of events.  It could be something personal or impersonal. The inspiration for this song came from the realities of wars which are difficult to ignore. There have been many examples of humans, paying dearly for our selfish ways and it continues to cost us. Mistakes. Loss.  Failures. Wreckage. Death. History is on a repeat and religious factions – and oil – seem to continue to wreak conflict.

Lost in Babylon was written in one sitting after hearing about a 19 year old soldier dying. It triggered a need for me to respond in some way. The news of a young man perishing in combat is not anything new with over 44,000 American soldiers dying since the beginning of the war. And countless of innocent Iraqis. So much destruction and so much pain on both sides. And even though the war is over now, the country is in turmoil and new patterns of fighting are emerging with the jihadists. I was thinking about the history of a country and its destruction and the fact that Babylon is the ancient name for modern day Iraq. It seems to me that so many got lost in this conflict. So many got lost in Babylon: soldiers not knowing what they were fighting for, lost in a historical culture they could not relate to in any way. Politicians lost in their own ideological and selfish confrontations. Media lost in their own pursuit of readers in a crumbling and changing landscape of journalism. And perhaps most lost of all: the innocent civilians in Iraq, seeing their culture and history being wrecked by a foreign power.

Here, in our culture, the Iraq war has taken a profound toll on soldiers, men and women alike, who most likely didn’t expect the complexities, stresses, and horrors of war and its aftermath. Now it may be a permanent part of their daily lives, out of the war zone and back to lives shattered and altered. In the early days of the war veterans returned to what seemed to be a national welcome but as the endless conflict went on and on and as media lost interest, the stories have become harder to find. A vast majority of them are dealing with mental health illnesses, PTSD, death of comrades, and wreckage of war. And Iraq is going through its own emotional reconstruction and people forget that these biblical themed incursions are still very much as current in present-day Iraq as it was in the ancient Babylon. The world’s largest city at one point in history with fertile land and civilized people has become a crumbling reminder of what a decade long war can do to turn its present day infrastructure and culture into a lost barren land. As I see the broken mud-brick buildings, debris and remains of ancient Babylon – I can’t help but wonder about the similarities of biblical times that are still reflected in our present-day life. What has caused this transformation? Is it religion, politics, or human greed? How do we justify the wreckage that wars create? That story - about the 19 year old soldier dying - moved me and brought so many questions to my mind, and as a result I did what I do best. I sat down and wrote.

This song is called Lost in Babylon.