Present and former members of Rage Against The Machine, Foo Fighters, The Runaways, The Bangles and the MC5 have teamed up with Afghanistan music collective The Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar on a cover of Sweet Dreams.
Foo Fighters’ keyboard man Rami Jaffee, Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, former Runaways lead vocalist Cherie Currie and The Bangles Vicki Peterson are among the contributors to the cover, which was originally a Number 1 hit in America for British new wave duo Eurhythmics in 1983.
The Miraculous Love Kids/Girl With a Guitar group was founded in 2015 by American musician Lanny Cordola after he met an Afghan girl named Mursal, whose two sisters had been killed some years prior by a suicide bomber.
“I feel a moral and spiritual imperative to awaken humanity, in particular my brethren in the music community to help give a voice to the horrible plight of poverty-stricken, war-torn girls,” Cordola explains. “Why girls? Because they have it the worst — forced into childhood marriages, stripped of their rights, and exploited in every way imaginable.”
Asked why he and the girls chose this particular song to cover, Cordola says: “We wanted to do something moody — a kind of gothic hymn — and we gravitated towards the dark yet hopeful spirit of this song.”
“The lines in the song — ‘some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you, some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused’ — really resonate, reflecting these troubled times. But then a glimmer of optimism — ‘hold your head up…keep your head up’ — gently flows through the voices of these girls who have experienced the worst that humanity has to offer.”
“These girls are so brave and so inspiring,” says Tom Morello. “It is an honour to make music with them.”
