"Lullabies from the axis of Evil"

[Sand]

There seems to be a great interest in this recording.
Read article in Washington Post

Perhaps the most difficult part of the project for Hillestad was finding Western artists, particularly Americans, to add their voices to the songs. Many were asked, he says, but either didn't respond or said through their management that the album was too politically risky in those days leading up to the war in Iraq.

In the end, however, artists from nine Western countries, including the United States, would take part. One American who immediately jumped on board was Rickie Lee Jones, popular singer-songwriter and an outspoken critic of the Bush administration.

"George Bush and Dick Cheney and [John] Ashcroft are the axis of evil," Jones said in a phone interview from her home last week. "They are a triad of evil, and so of course they would think in those terms. To go down in history as the president who called the Middle East people evil is a terrible legacy. In political times to try to evoke religion and the ideas of goodness and evil, when you're fighting about oil -- to try to get the American people to think of these people as evil because you want their oil -- this is what he's trying to do."

On "My Tulip, My Pearl," Fremerman and Iranian singer Pari Zanganeh -- who alternate verses, as do most of the "partners" on the disc -- are accompanied by the Washington National Cathedral's girls choir. Hillestad says he was intrigued with the idea of using a choir from what he described as the official center of religious life in the United States. Greg Rixon, a spokesman for the Washington Cathedral, shies away from any symbolic inference. "We didn't see it in political terms at all," he said. "This project is rather universal in that the suffering that the whole world endures during war is most poignantly felt by women and children. And we believe it is that sentiment that is reflected in this disc."