“What we’re going to see in the next five to ten years is a shift towards parallel economies and parallel societies. That’s the only way out of this juggernaut.”
Jude Robers
“My music has undergone a huge transformation in the last two years. My first and immediate response to the plandemic was: ‘This feels like fascism; there’s something wrong here.’ I don’t believe the government ever has the prerogative to shut down your right to gather and make art. Whether the danger is real or perceived, made up or not. I was very suspicious from the start, and then I felt angry for a while.
Anger is a transitional tool to direct energy. What I felt wasn’t so much about me feeling oppressed; but (feeling) the oppression of society as a whole and viewing it as large-scale tyranny. The fact that a lot of people were not waking up to it fueled my anger. First it turned inward to depression, but it wasn’t very long before I was able to direct it outward again in a constructive way, and in part I credit my partner Sierra with that. She did a poetry challenge in April 2020 called “30 By 30”; meaning you write one poem every day. I started doing that with my songs, and made thirty song-starts! A lot of them turned into really great songs. That led into the “truth music” which to me is just expressing my own authenticity and my own truth. I think that If I stand in that, many people will resonate with it. It was very transformative for me.
Before the lockdown, I was playing gigs all over the place; even Europe. I took a group on a retreat to Greece and taught songwriting classes, and we played together as a group. All of this came to a screeching halt. I was supposed to do another [retreat] in 2020 in Santorini, Greece. All the touring and ideas I had – to grow my business and express myself creatively – suddenly got shut down. I was very resentful of the idea of using the digital world to perform music. I never did any virtual concerts – it just wasn’t for me.
The first concert I did during the lockdown was in my backyard. That went really well, with about 50 people attending and no imposed restrictions. After that I connected with a wonderful freedom community through a friend of mine that started a [sovereignty] group and then all of these other people came out of the woodwork. We started gathering and discussing all of the things we could offer each other in terms of community & services. I started playing at every group meeting; each week. They were the perfect audience.
Later on, in December 2021, I performed as part of a show with Cassidy Maze at Arklight. Dr. Tom Cowan was attending. He is a wonderful M.D. with fascinating ideas about health, including the nature of water and human cell biology. I have been working with him the last few months playing songs at his lectures, and he plays my songs on his webinars.
I’ve been singing since I was very young. At eight years old my parents asked me if I wanted to take voice lessons. I liked that idea and they kept encouraging my vocal abilities. I learned how to sing classical music and when I was ten, my mother lent me her acoustic guitar and I taught myself the chords from a chart and started playing folk/ rock music. My last year of High School I got into the Boston Conservatory of Music and ended up majoring in classical voice. After two years I realized I wasn’t cut out for Opera. I took a break from School and went back to SUNY Purchase College in New York realizing that I really wanted to be a songwriter. I only had two songs at that point, which I auditioned with, and they accepted me. From that point on I was studying how to write songs, the history of rock ‘n roll, and learning how to use recording equipment. I graduated in 1997 and between that time and now I have been a songwriter and a performer; living in California and all over New York state. I’m now settled in Woodstock still doing my thing.
PBS just aired a documentary that features one of my songs. It’s titled “We Remember: Songs of Survivors” and it is the culmination of a project that I began in mid- 2018 with an organization called SageArts. Songwriters were paired up with Holocaust survivors and we were asked to meet with them, listen and get to know them. We were then tasked to tell their stories and legacies through song. I wrote a song for a man named Tommy Wald. Sadly, he passed away on April 16th of 2019, before the song was finished, but his family did me the incredible honor of asking me to play the completed song at his burial. The documentary was released on April 26th, 2022. The four songwriters featured in the film are now creating performances around the songs. I feel that what I learned from this project is highly relevant to current events of the last two years. Fascism has taken many forms throughout history and I think that the biosecurity State is its latest incarnation.
The last two years have been intensely divisive, and I believe this is intentional. What we really should be doing is collaborating. Instead of division, we could be voluntarily collaborating with other people who think differently in order to create new ideas. It’s exactly what the globalist power brokers don’t want: people collaborating and bridging ideologies.
There are an incredible number of people doing fantastic journalism and commentary and I’m learning from them, too. James Corbett, Catherine Austin Fitts, Whitney Webb & Richard Grove. I can actually digest what these people are saying and it is really constructive. They are saying we have to move beyond the left/right paradigm. ‘Mr Global’ is operating outside of that paradigm and manipulating it to their own end.
What we’re going to see in the next five to ten years is a shift towards parallel economies and parallel societies. That’s the only way out of this juggernaut. I don’t believe we’re going to fight our way through tyranny by pushing back. Of course I see the value in individual non-compliance, but I think the most effective solution is creating alternate systems that attract like-minded people. I went down to the protests in NYC in 2020 and started playing for people. I joined some of the regional sovereignty groups. There’s a very strong one in Columbia County near Albany. They were ready for this before anybody else was. Their community was already in place. If people can see you’ve created something that’s more interesting and works better, it’ll draw them in and they’ll gravitate towards it naturally. The people that are really interested in sovereignty and collaboration and who are realizing politics is a scam will move out of the big cities. They’ll form little enclaves in the hills or countryside, grow their own food and they’re going to be more or less self-sufficient, even finding their own energy sources. The last 2-3 years my partner and I have been growing food ourselves and we’re getting better at it every year.
My challenge right now is to reach out to the larger community and find true patrons. I’m building a Locals.com page for people who are willing to support me in my efforts to connect people to each other and the music. We have to go forward, whether that means an underground (music) railroad, playing music out in a field or just completely ignoring the regulations. We’re going to have to work together.
I feel that the highest purpose of art is to transform us, so that we transcend our physical being, and connect with our spiritual reality.”
You can see Jude on these dates:
May 21 West Kill Brewing, West Kill NY 2-5pm
May 29th Hudson Brewing Hudson NY 4-7pm
June 3rd Mettabee Farm “Homesteady” show w/Cassidy Maze, Jon B. Woodin, Matt Bua and guests 8pm
June 24th Mohonk Mountain House New Paltz, NY
July 15th Mohonk Mountain House New Paltz, NY
August 28th Mohonk Mountain House New Paltz, NY
Sept 18th Cutting Room, NYC – 8pm
Sept 22nd Caffe Lena, Saratoga NY – 8pm
Sept 23rd Mohonk Mountain House New Paltz, NY
www.juderoberts.com
Documentary link: www.weremembersongsofsurvivors.com/
Locals.com link: https://locals.com/member/JudeRoberts
Dr. Tom Cowan link: https://drtomcowan.com/