The main inspiration of this project is « Amazing Grace », a well-known Christian hymn written in 1772 by the Anglican clergyman and poet John Newton, and still vividly interpreted in the Anglo-Saxon world. The text has been arranged musically with several melodies through past centuries - the most famous one being composed by William Walker around 1835.

This hymn evokes the remission of sins by faith in God and salvation by grace, themes linked to the personal experience of the writer, former slave ship worker and trader John Newton who became a slave in his turn for 3 years in West Africa. He had, during a violent storm at sea in 1748 while he was rescued from his enslavement, called out to God for mercy. This was the beginning of his spiritual conversion to Christianity. He considered himself later a repentant sinner saved by divine grace.

However, it was not until 1788, 34 years after he had left the slave trade, that he became an activist for the abolition of African slave trade. He published then a pamphlet entitled Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the horrific conditions of the slave ships. He worked in the end of his life with William Wilberforce, a British politician and leader of the abolitionist movement.

John Newton lived to see the British passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807. The act abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, especially the triangular trade in the Atlantic Ocean, and also encouraged British action to put pressure on other European states to abolish the slave trade on their part. Newton died few months later. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833, a law voted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire, occurred 26 years later.

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I composed the EP during Avril 2020 in Paris, during the confinement and the pandemic episode which is still affecting our world and societies. The growing loneliness of my daily life, the emotional and physical distanciation from those I love, combined with a heavy sense of a possible end of mankind, pushed me to read poetry speaking of grace, divine and religious conversions. I stumbled upon « Amazing Grace » on the internet, and behind my screen, felt the urge to compose something uplifting, full of hope and mercy for my specie. Reading the life of John Newton and his progressive repentance, I decided to build a project about the life of this man and my own need of spiritual elevation, facing the fear of death and the perpetual human hesitance between Vice and Vertu.

The beginning and the internationalization of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death and assassination of George Floyd in Houston, May the 25th, gave to the project a new sense - a new interpretation ; a tragic one for sure. More than two centuries later, racism, racial violence and discriminations linked to skin color are still vivid and effective all around the world.

Hate is still effective. Fear of the Other is still effective. Class conflicts are still more than effective, and unbridled capitalism deepens social inequalities. Spiritual beliefs decrease in the West, and individualism is now a prominent and vastly accepted phenomenon. Religion is still a vector of hatred and massacres. All of these facts are strongly linked, and, although these lines may seem naive and puerile to the reader, manichean or deceptively rebellious, the obvious becomes indisputable. Charity can’t bind with profit. Disinterested love can’t cooperate with communitarianism. Forgiveness can’t merge with revenge.

And this project is, at least to me, a call for forgiveness. A gush towards grace and the divine. A need of repentance. Whatever you call it : sin, error, misconduct ; every human being has a certain inclination to guilt and a certain part of shadow. You might be a determinist or an existentialist, you are unlikely to never experience the feeling of guilt.

But guilt can also be a force which drive us to kindness, comprehension, and a fierce desire for justice and the better that hides in us. Still, one needs to recognize its guilt. It is important to acknowledge that the truth in your heart is sometimes different from the one in your brain.

“[The believer] believes and feels his own weakness and unworthiness, and lives upon the grace and pardoning love of his Lord. This gives him an habitual tenderness and gentleness of spirit”
_ John Newton, The Works of the Rev. John Newton, Vol. 1, p. 170