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Susan Muranty

Singer/Songwriter, Lyricist, Sculptor, Artist LIKE Susan Muranty Music & Art on Facebook!

Silver Storms Past and Present

Posted on 16 Dec 13 Awards & Prizes, Blog | No Comments

Silver Storm was the first of my songs to win a lyric-writing award – at the 2009 Australian Songwriters’s Association (ASA) conference in Ettalong NSW.

I was so thrilled!!!

No Oscar-winning moment could ever equal the feeling of standing on the podium that day in the distinguished company of so many great songwriters – from Jason Blume and Gary Pinto to Ray Burton (who wrote I Am Woman for Helen Reddy ). It was such a precious moment and I’ll never forget it. But even more precious was the meaning behind these lyrics and the defiant mood in which they were written at the height of the US involvement in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I could not believe how soldiers – both men and women – were being sent back for recurrent tours of duty by a relentless US Army who ignored not only the toll on their physical and mental health but the insidious destruction of their family lives. It seemed utterly inhumane to me. And one of the great, stupid ironies of war.

I grew up with war as an ever-present ghost in my family so it’s a subject I know something about. My own Grandfather was tortured and shot by the Gestapo in Poland in 1939 (two months after the Second World War broke out). He was a Polish Army Intelligence Officer and a veteran of the Battle of the Black Madonna (or Miracle of the Vistula), an infamous showdown between Poland and Russia that turned the tide against the Communist advance across Europe in 1920. I have a photo of him in his uniform, an imposing man carrying a sabre at his belt on the lost streets of the old city of Warsaw during the 1930s. My Grandfather had long been an outspoken opponent against Hitler, so he was already a marked man – but he was also a father and a husband. My own father – his only son – was just 12 years old and bound for a labour camp when he was asked to take care of his mother and sisters by the man who loved them more than anything else in the world. My Grandfather died with the Polish National Anthem on his lips, defiantly singing it out loud with his comrades to the men who gunned them down with such ice-veined coldness and cruelty.

I often think about my Polish Grandmother, whom I never met. My grandfather was her great love and she was only in her thirties when he was murdered. Of course, she never married again. And my father, who was just a boy lucky to escape with his life when war ended, could not return to a Poland where the Iron Curtain had fallen with such a shocking and impenetrable thud. Having lived through the horrors of war – and there were many too unspeakable to write about – she never saw her only son or felt the touch of her husband again. This song is for her – and for anyone missing someone they love at Christmas. It’s a song about a woman who longs for her family to be reunited, for her true love to be safe in her arms at this special time of the year. It’s a song about the “silver storm” of longing – a longing for something that should never have to be yearned for in that way. A longing for something precious and beautiful, a longing created by the great and terrible injustice of war.

It seems insensitive and incongruous to say it now, but it was tremendous fun shooting the video for this song. We were like a troop of children let loose in the forest in the middle of the night – and just about as sensible. But I like to think that’s what my grandfather died for – so that his children and their children could be freer than free, innocent and unthinking in their joy, ludicrously and exuberantly childlike about all the things that make them happy and forgetful of the hardships he endured.

It is my duty to create – it is my birthright, won for me by a grandfather who played for it with nothing less than his death. Every breath of creative fire I breathe is for him. For any artist, it’s a no-brainer. In the face of destruction, the only true choice … is to do the opposite.

I carry that sabre with me wherever I go.

This is a special blog to mark the release of Silver Storm this week, now available on iTunes at  https://itun.es/i6Fw8MM

Catch the video clip at http://youtu.be/TwKTJzBKV-Y

Photo: Co-writers (and actors!) Sven Tydeman and Susan Muranty in a shot from the film clip for Silver Storm

 

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