Mike McCready, Thanks.

If you have a fascination in human rights, take a few minutes to see Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready sing “Crying Moon”. It’s up at @mikemccreadypj. McCready wrote the dynamic and heart-rendering melody in favor of his close, personal friend, mega-famous Chris Cornell, who was the singer, guitarist and primary songwriter in three world-famous rock-and-roll bands from Seattle: Soundgarden, Audioslave and Temple of the Dog.

Interesting indeed how McCready sings. He finds a way to subtly bring to the foreground the matter of major human rights abuses. It’s more than a tearjerker. It is an anguished cry for help in support of those who give away much persona, and the lives of their family, to the world of music.

Feels like McCready spends a thousand hours looking at a heart upon a sleeve before pulling it back to perform “Crying Moon.” And I almost want to cry, myself, when thinking about him putting it onto the social media sphere—signing off, as the thing seems to evaporate into the material web of interconnected computer networks. I hope he will be remembered for it, and I hope it gets the full-out studio production the material is deserving of, quite clearly.

Mike McCready knows something. Like Chris Cornell, McCready is a well-known person in music, globally. He is the original lead guitarist of Pearl Jam, a rock band loved, and fought over, in more than 197 countries.

The United Nations’ wrote out “Article 27” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a protection of the material and moral interests for the benefit of the creator. Everywhere, there’s a long, long row to hoe to make the promises by the United Nations a guarantee.

I listen to Mike McCready’s “Crying Moon” a lot and I think about the people I’ve seen since I embarked on the road of protecting human rights. It calls to mind many men and women who were brought to the grave despite heroic fame in the world of music. As McCready beautifully relays in “Crying Moon,” it’s important to choose your friends well, especially when holding such awesome power as the best always do.

I get ornery hearing news about a death. It’s a strange thing to face a man who enjoys death in others. It can be violent, but much more dangerously it can flash upon the lips with the death sentence uttered almost so veiled it sounded like no one spoke a thing until it was done. As I go through life, this is the hardest thing to know, because it is an excruciating time when you can confront how men and women sometimes think to kill another person. It’s just something that we, as America, cannot ignore in the world of fine arts anymore.

I feel good writing about protecting human rights for songwriters, musicians and performers. I like to say we can absorb forever hatreds in a song: just let the bad feelings go into a sound, because everything can become beautiful, I’m told. I also believe we will lose our chance to sing if we don’t speak now about the need to act planetwide, to preserve the human rights of music makers. It’s my personal feeling about what Cornell often dealt with.

I caught a glimpse of the McCready song, “Crying Moon,” today, for the first time. Later, I watched McCready introduce it and then sing it, over and over.  It’s a wonderful study to learn something from.