Above: Nigel Parry, December 2000. (Photo: Suzanne Klotz)

Sherri Muzher: You are an Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter, who was raised around the world with travel as a part of life for as long as you can remember. What effect did that have on you? Is your Scottish heritage reflected in any of your music or lyrics?

Nigel Parry: [laughs] Scots have a historical tendency to leave Scotland and explore the world! I certainly did that much. You get to experience a lot of different cultures without necessarily being part of them. With this upbringing as an observer, I naturally gravitated towards journalism, but music remains the most direct way to express emotional experience. Music is journalism of the heart.

Sherri Muzher: What songs are on the album?

Nigel Parry: Songs that don't differentiate between the love you feel for a person from the love you feel for a people. It's all about passion, and trying to do things in a way that matters. There are also some, um, shall we say 'alternative' love songs on the album and a song about the whole process of performing.

The four songs about Palestine are unusual. No singer-songwriters have really touched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, probably mostly out of fear of stirring up a political hornet's nest. If you care about people, the reaction you get for standing with them shouldn't matter, and the Palestinians are the longest-suffering and longest-remaining example of human disrespect for human rights. The rights you lose in one part of the world are lost simultaneously everywhere. Once it is okay somewhere, it is okay everywhere. And we stop thinking about anything like we should be thinking about it.

Sherri Muzher Were the songs written with an audience in mind?

Nigel Parry: In terms of the creative process, the songs were not really written with an external audience in mind, bar 'Forget' and 'Stage', where the lyrics make it clear that an audience is clearly the point. They were written for me. This is just about sharing them.

The process aside, I hope the music encourages people to go out and actively find out about the world for themselves, to "step outside their lives to where the neighbourhood changes," as Ani DiFranco puts it. The main reason is not so glorious except to find out who you are. If you want the, "Am I a product of my environment?" question answered, go somewhere different and live there for a while. Do you change? It's all good stuff. It's good to give yourself a chance to feel, to just see where your feet fall. It's all about moving forwards. Although it may be difficult in the short term, everything else follows after a while. You learn to listen to things and hear them in a different way. You get to live them.

Sherri Muzher: What is the significance of the song, "This Side of Paradise" and tell me why you selected it as the title for your first CD?

Nigel Parry: As an idea, it captures both the issues and contradictions raised by the lyrics and the ethereal quality of the music. The actual lyrics that the phrase is attached to sum up the album. These songs about Palestine deal with things that I can't let rest and shouldn't be put to rest. They need to be addressed. The song itself is a series of snapshots of things that I saw or experienced on my first visits to Palestine. They sum up a lot of the sadness of the country, the pervasiveness of the military occupation, and the difficulties faced by Palestinians in their daily lives. Over there, all people experience things that only a few of us in the West even have to think about.

Sherri Muzher: One particular verse stands out which talks about an interaction you had with a woman. People were standing with their heads bowed in a large crowd, and you asked her if this was for the national anthem. Can you talk about that?

Nigel Parry: Yes. It happened in 1993 during my third visit to Birzeit University, the Palestinian Oxford or Harvard. I went along to a conference on campus with Emma Naughton, who was the coordinator of the Human Rights Action Project at the university. At that time, perhaps 80 percent of the male students had been through a prison and torture experience. It's hard to communicate what damage that level of abuse does to a society, the pain and psychological trauma released into an entire generation.

As we sat down, everyone stood up. All the announcements were in Arabic, which I didn't understand at all at the time, and so I leaned over to Emma and asked if this was for the national anthem. She leaned over and whispered that no, it wasn't, it was a minute's silence for the members of the university that had been killed during the Israeli military occupation. We stood apart for a few seconds watching, then she leaned back, and whispered, "Yes, it is the national anthem." And more than most, she knew, from the kinds of dealings she had with the university community in her human rights work.

That remains one of the most profound truths for me about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, that the Palestinian national anthem should be a minute's silence.

Sherri Muzher: What are your thoughts as you reflect on this verse given the current bloodshed of the Second Intifada, that started on September 28th, 2000?

Nigel Parry: It's no less true. The over 300 Palestinians killed, and 10,000 seriously injured speaks for itself. It's a body factory over there. That the Western media doesn't seem to get this is sad. There has been a thoroughly effective campaign of demonisation of the Palestinians that started with the racism of early travel writers to the Middle East like Mark Twain, through Hollywood from 1930s to the present, to the status quo of the pro-Israel lobby and columnists of the New York Times today. It's the same old story of the dehumanisation of a people to the point where we don't care whether they are getting killed or not.

Sherri Muzher: Is there any song on this CD that you particularly like?

Nigel Parry: I like all the songs on it. I'd like to record more live songs with better equipment but I'd really like to get into a studio to record them with other musicians to fully explore them as songs. Apart from that, as they stand, they represent something I feel good about. It's live music. What you lose in quality -- I mean, I decided to credit a coffee machine as a musical instrument and the coffee bar staff as musicians on some tracks! -- you gain in the directness of it all. It captures the spirit of the songs which is the most important part.

Sherri Muzher: You've often quoted Bruce Cockburn and in fact, maintain a website on the work of this Canadian singer-songwriter. Why has Bruce Cockburn commanded so much of your respect?

Nigel Parry: Cockburn is all about reality and questioning the hard things in a both a beautiful and positive way. For him, this has meant that he made a decision not to tone anything down in order to get successful. He has a discography of 25 albums that don't sound like anything else around. The continuing quality of Cockburn's songwriting and music easily puts him up in the top five people writing today. And, amazingly, he gets better with age. What more needs to be said?

Sherri Muzher: Besides Bruce Cockburn, are there any other artists or individuals in your life who have influenced your style and lyrics?

Nigel Parry: After Cockburn, I'd cite Billy Bragg, Suzanne Vega, Tracey Chapman, the Waterboys, and a ton of primal stuff from a variety of bands and singers. I love Suzanne Vega and Mike Scott's (Waterboys) vocal styles.

The Waterboys, Tracey Chapman and Cockburn mix political and spiritual themes in lyrics that totally work. As for Arab musicians, I always liked the directness and humour of Ziad Rahbani.

The primal stuff, and I'm talking about the punk I used to listen to and some of the hardcore groups around today like Rage Against The Machine, and this whole explosion of female singer-songwriters like Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, and Alanis Morrissette - these, these are all about the healing power you can release when you direct your anger into creativity. That, I like a lot.

The list would be endless as it all sinks in somehow. But its a learning process. It's not about being derivative. It's about getting envisioned by other musicians who are further along in their careers. You hear people learning to hear themselves. You learn to accept it's an ongoing journey for you and it's about finding your own voice.

Sherri Muzher: Besides Palestine and Minneapolis, what other areas have you played your music?

Nigel Parry: I've busked in Edinburgh and Amsterdam, but my university years in London were where I really started to play the songs I had written in public and see how they lived or died when pushed out from the nest.

Palestine was always a good place hear other people play and to share music. There's a real musical core in the culture over there, that is seen as part of normal socialising. Forget gigs in theatres and bars. Forget going to the pub on a Friday or Saturday night. Give me a bunch of people in a living room and right there you'll see real fun!

Sherri Muzher: As our thoughts stay with personal experiences in Palestine, describe what images continue to haunt you most from that chapter in your life.

Nigel Parry: After the album, read the diary from that time at nigelparry.com/diary to answer that question more. It gives you more context to the emotional snapshots that are in the songs and gives you more of an idea about my time there.

Really, the whole place haunts you, as it should. Nothing there is okay. That there is peace or ever was peace after Oslo was a total lie. But it was a lie that we wanted to hear. People repeat patterns throughout history that we can learn from. Lesson number one is that people will want what other people have and they will get it any way they can. And that can be someone else's land, someone else's car, or someone else's heart. The damage this causes should never be tolerated or excused for the sake of gain.

Sherri Muzher: If you could summarize in one phrase the message you want people to take away from "This Side of Paradise," what would it be?

Nigel Parry: The message in one phrase? Make reality and the other humans on the planet your friends. We're here to look out for each other.

Listen to and buy the This Side Of Paradise album now as a free download from this website.

Contact Nigel Parry