San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
What’s new in the arts
Danielle Lopresti, founder of San Diego Indiefest, revisits her song ‘22 Mountains’
If you need a lift during these troubled times, take four and a half minutes out of your day and experience San Diego Indiefest founder Danielle Lopresti’s video performance of “22 Mountains.” The re-recording of the title track from a 2003 album by Lopresti and her band, The Masses, is a passionate exhortation of hope and courage, slightly reworded from the original composition by Lopresti and Matthew Stewart. The message — to parents, to teachers, to artists, to activists, to visionaries — is clear: Don’t give up.
“This (‘22 Mountains’) was a simple song off my second release,” Lopresti explained from her home in Oakland. “For whatever reason, a lot of people over the years told me they have really identified with it. Alicia (Champion, Lopresti’s spouse and collaborator) suggested this COVID time might be an appropriate time to revisit this. And after the Capitol attack, she just looked at me and said: ‘Let’s just do this right. Let’s send a love letter out to the world.’ ”
For the virtual recording, Lopresti was able to reunite many of the original members of The Masses, including Stewart on guitar, percussionist Tre Balfour, keyboardist Stephen Snyder, drummer Kevin Dow and bassist Kelly
Bowen, as well as Champion.
“Artists are starved to create, so everyone got back immediately,” Lopresti said. “We just asked them to record themselves on their cellphones: quick and dirty and easy. Just play your part and record yourself and we’ll throw it together.”
As you’ll discover, the resultant video hardly looks or sounds thrown together. Give yourself over to it.
“I hope people will feel less alone and feel connected in that way that music can do,” Lopresti said. “Having to stay physically so far from one another has a cost. We wanted to serenade our human family and just say ‘We love you’ to as many people as we could.” youtube.com