“Stand Up” featuring Shea Diamond, Dan Reynolds and The Blood Beetroots available now
In a charged response to both the outrage and solidarity rising from the national reckoning over police brutality and systemic racism, GRAMMY Award-winning musician and activist Tom Morello turned to a score of fellow artist comrades – Imagine Dragons’ Dan Reynolds, producer The Bloody Beetroots and artist/activist Shea Diamond.
The result is “Stand Up,” a reflection of the diversity of people unifying against racism in this moment – available everywhere now on KIDinaKORNER/Interscope Records. The searing track was co-written by Morello, Reynolds, Diamond, The Bloody Beetroots, Justin Tranter and Eren Cannata.
The lyrics partly read, “When I call the police will they just kill me? Will they just kill you? When I call the police will they just protect me cause I’m white skinned too? Stand up / Cause you are standing for nothing / Just shut up / Cause your words mean nothing.”
“I grew up in the tiny lily white, archly conservative town of Libertyville, Illinois,” Morello says of the track. “When I was a kid, someone hung a noose in my family’s garage, there was occasional N-word calling, etc, etc. On June 6th of this year, there was a Black Lives Matter rally and march in that same town that drew over 1,000 people.”
He continues, “It seems that the times, they are a’changin’. I was so inspired that night, I reached out to Dan from Imagine Dragons. The Bloody Beetroots and I had conjured a slamming track and within 24 hours Dan had sent back a completed vocal. We got Shea Diamond, a black transgender woman with a long history of activism, on the track and the coalition was complete.”
“When Tom reached out to work together with Shea Diamond and The Bloody Beetroots on this track I immediately went up into my room and wrote/sang the chorus and verse that day,” Reynolds adds of the song’s urgency. “This country certainly needs fixing, and I believe it will take people from all sides and colors to fix it.”
All four artists will be donating 100% of their proceeds from “Stand Up” to the following organizations: NAACP, Know Your Rights Camp, Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Marsha P. Johnson Institute – all of whom Morello hails “are doing great work combating racism, injustice, and police brutality.” KIDinaKORNER/Interscope will additionally donate an amount equal to the artists’ record royalties derived from streams of the track for a three-year period.
The NAACP is the largest and most pre-eminent civil rights organization in the nation. Their mission is to secure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights in order to eliminate race-based discrimination and ensure the health and well-being of all persons.
Know Your Rights Camp works to advance the liberation and well-being of Black and Brown communities through education, self-empowerment, mass-mobilization and the creation of new systems that elevate the next generation of change leaders.
Southern Poverty Law Center is dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society.
The Marsha P. Johnson Institute protects and defends the human rights of Black transgender people by organizing, advocating, creating an intentional community to heal, developing transformative leadership, and promoting our collective power.
