I was reading the speeches of Winston Churchill and came across his radio address to the citizens of France on the eve of the invasion of Normandy. To me his words seemed more like a prayer, a loving, cautionary tribute to the soldiers who were being fated for death, horror, sacrifice and glory on the beachfronts of D-Day. I couldn’t imagine for one second George Bush or Dick Cheney mustering up this kind of poetry for our men and women heading for a different kind of sand, a different kind of war. Churchill’s words reveal the weight of history; Bush’s calumny reveals the ruse of indifference. Wisdom carries the burden of knowledge, while ignorance is free to deceive.

This song is the beginning of my own broken-hearted attempt to understand America over the last decade and the true nature of what cause for which our men and women suffer and die, and why a nation is so willingly ready to sacrifice its substance and soul.

I am grateful for the Curtis Brown Company of London, England for giving me permission to use Sir Winston Churchill’s elegant words. I’m equally grateful to my nephew, David Morneau, for altering a recording I made of the “Agneus Dei”— the choral adaptation of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings—and reshaping it with water sounds to create the “Water Chorus” which begins Trepanning and establishes the kind of mood I was seeking. The goal was to have Barber’s piece collapse upon itself, to almost drown in the waves crashing about. I’m not sure why I wanted this, though.

I believed following the days of 9/11 that Barber’s emotionally charged piece was overused by network TV and over-amplified the already profound sadness of the tragedy. The music practically made time stand still and postponed the kinds of reflection needed to penetrate our national melancholy. We needed an immediate and broader discussion of the event’s cause and effect, and the overuse of Barber’s elegy became the national anthem of death and, therefore, grew quite paralyzing as we waited for our government to act.

I remember feeling manipulated by the unending collages of 9/11 imagery over Barber’s score, and imagined the kinds of discussions that took place in TV editing suites all across America—conversations that invariably, but hopefully and thoughtfully, considered accomplishing work that didn’t just aspire to out-sentimentalize this nightmare. It made me tire and struggle with my own cynicism about how I receive and reject the media’s marketing of reality. At times I just wanted to go to sleep. French social philosopher Guy Debard would say that this is the desired effect off mass media’s binging on spectacle.

I was up in Maine when I wrote the guitar part and melody for Churchill’s words. The melody came quickly and the open D tuning allowed me the liberty to construct a melody within the closed framework of the D major chord, which unburdened itself at the end with a minor turn, initiating the proper mournful setting for Churchill’s prayer.