Justin and I have just got back from the prison on highway 14 where we played our music for the guys who are incarcerated there. Wow! What an experience.

I really wanted to get on here to our community news and say how fantastic the evening was. I had never been to a prison before (bar one faltered effort to play last year, whilst heavily pregnant, that didn’t happen due to a lock-down at the priz). I didn’t really know what to expect and the brusque (to say the least) manner of the guards at the door was mildly off-putting, yet I guess to be understood given their job.

Still, once we got into the gym and were helped with our stuff by a few of the guys in there, I started to feel more comfortable and at home, plus Jane was there. I have spent several years teaching high school and once I reasoned that prison is basically the same thing – a government institution, compulsory, that no one ever really wants to attend!! – I relaxed into the normal nerves that precede a gig: adrenaline mainly and a sort of calm focus with jitters…

Anyway, blah blah blah – we played, for about an hour and a half, we finished and were applauded, we answered questions and discussed our current wagon tour mission and we left. Yet the real magic – and I don’t use that word lightly – was the communication and the transformational energy that resulted from whatever it was that really happened in that space.

Hats off to Jane, really and truly. Her introduction set something in motion, it certainly did in me – and I recognised a wee moist sparkle in Justin’s eye too. Jane told us of holding the eyes of a man who was executed by electric chair; holding his eyes until his death and mouthing to him the words, ‘I love you, Chris, go in peace.’

With peace, transformation, possibility, optimism and a certain intangible something in the air, we played our set. Afterwords we were able to listen to some of the talent in the prison as two of the lads borrowed Justin’s guitar and played a song each of their own. We hope to go back.

Thanks to everyone: to all the guys tonight who shared the evening with us so graciously and so attentively and who shared something of themselves with us, to Jane for organizing this opportunity and to the prison service, for providing the space within ‘corrections’ for ‘transformations’.

Amaani