On Wednesday, Emmy Award-winning performing artist Wyatt Jackson and Latin Grammy Award-winner Gen Rubin called in to Boston Public Radio, where the two talked about their latest collaboration, a three-minute call-to-action titled “Get Up.” The song is currently available to stream on Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon Music under the moniker We the People.
"Get Up" follows on the heels of ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and urges listeners to actively confront racial injustice, with lyrics reading "It’s not enough to cry / It’s not enough to wonder why / It’s not enough to say I’m your ally / It’s not enough to just stand by."
"It truly just was borne out of the pain that everyone was seeing, and we were all witnessing,” Rubin explained. “We just felt like we had to do something, we had to say something, and since this is the only thing we know how to do — this is our medium — we just started working on it. ... There was no real thought about, 'What are we gonna end up doing with this,’ or anything, we just felt this need to do it. And within a day, Wyatt and I, and my wife, had written the entire song — just flowed right out of us,” Rubin said.
The song has an accompanying music video due in the near future, which will be released in collaboration with the nonprofit group Feel Good Voting.
"When Gen had delivered the lyrics he wrote, he and Cheryl, his wife, wrote, I was like, ‘This is exactly how I feel,’” Jackson said. “It made me want to keep going with this project — like the ‘get up’ for me was, ‘Let’s keep going, let’s do this. Let’s make the video, let’s put it out there, let’s communicate to our friends. Let’s change this situation.’"
Wyatt Jackson is an Emmy-award winning performing artist and community leader in greater Boston; Gen Rubin is a Latin Grammy award winning producer and songwriter.