Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project

"For more than a decade, [Vijay] Iyer has worked with poet and performer Mike Ladd on a series of musical works about the lives of people of color since Sept. 11. The latest installment is called Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project, and features lyrics culled from interviews they conducted with Iraq and Afghanistan vets, who shared their still-fresh memories of combat. NPR's Arun Rath recently spoke with Vijay Iyer and Holding It Down contributor Maurice Decaul, who served in Iraq as a Marine and led a battalion into an-Nasiriyah in 2003. ... Vijay, how did you and Mike Ladd first come up with this project? VIJAY IYER: We had done two previous large-scale projects considering American life since 9/11: The first was called In What Language? and the second was called Still Life With Commentator. And we came to realize we were sort of looking at life in the shadows of war — you know, these two wars that the U.S. has been conducting on our dimes for the last decade or so. But we also realized that we hadn't really come face to face with the lived experience of war. So it seemed like if we were going to continue in that vein, the thing to do was to speak with veterans ..." (Arun Rath, "Vijay Iyer on Learning from War," All Things Considered, 9/29/13).

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