So, here is the background:  On the morning of January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti was shot to death at a protest in Minneapolis.  I learned about his death from a friend on Facebook who had posted one of the first videos of the killing.  But the videos I was watching did not match up with what people in power were starting to say about him. I felt there was no one telling his story. One video had a very clear image of Mr. Pretti, and I said to my wife: “He looked just like Bill.”  Our son Bill, is similar in age and has the same beard.  My wife Kathryn and I (we have been married for 50 years) discussed the fact that Bill would probably have been at the protest and he would have helped that woman up from the ground too.  The realization that what happened to Alex could have happened to my son, hit me very hard.

The next morning Sunday January 25, 2026, I got out of bed around 8:00am and filled up the tub for a nice long bath.  Taking a long bath is common for me because that is my creative space.  Alex’s death was still on my mind, and I thought I’d write a tribute piece to post on my Facebook page about his death. 

I spent about two hours working on the four-line refrain.  At 10:00am my wife Kathryn came into the bathroom and said: “Are you still in the tub?”  I said, “I’m writing something.”  And I showed her the four-line refrain which starts: “We just want to live in America…”  She read the four lines and said to me: “That’s really good.” That is high praise from Kathryn.  She was a middle-school English Teacher for 25 years and she is a tough critic.  For her to say: “That’s really good” without any hesitation meant a lot to me.  During the next two hours I worked on the poem line by line.  The lines were all over my iPhone screen, and now I had to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle, finding the right place for each line to tell his story.  Each time I nailed a line in the song, tears flowed.   I was so hoping Kathryn would not walk in and see me crying sitting in the bathtub.  My favorite moment was when I nailed the line: “Compliments of the red, white and blue.” 

At 12:00 noon, I had been in the tub for four hours.  Kathryn called in and said: “Are you STILL in the tub?”  I said: “Yes but I’m almost done.”  I got out of the tub, got dressed and handed her my phone and said: “Will you read this?”  The entire poem was complete word for word, exactly as it is in the song.  No edits.  My wife pointed out a few times the beats were off, tiny one syllable changes were needed.  Then she said: “You must change the word “woman” to “person.”  That was the only edit, I changed one word, and it was done.

That same afternoon I posted the poem on my Facebook Page. It got a lot of nice compliments.  My friend Nagee Muwwakkil Williams commented, Paul I could put your poem to music.  I said sure.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  A short while later Nagee emailed me an audio version of my poem set to a southern rock style soundtrack.  It was interesting… but not what I had in mind.  He told me he did it on a website called SUNO, an AI music creator.  That night around 9:00pm I went on SUNO signed up for a Pro License.  I entered my lyrics and gave it some prompts.  I did about 12 versions before I got one that sounded like what I had in mind.  I played my three top versions for my wife and we both agreed, this one sounded best.  About midnight, exactly 36 hours after I had first heard about the death of Alex Pretti went back into my office, put on a pair of headphones and listened to it at full volume.  I tried to imagine that I was hearing the words for the very first time, and I sat there and cried.  I thought for the first time… I may have written a song.

On Monday morning I posted the song on Facebook, around 10:00am.  So technically I published this song about 48 hours after Alex Pretti’s death.  Nothing.  For one full day no comments, no one listened to it, nothing.  I was a little down, but my wife Kathryn consoled me and told me it was a good poem and reminded me it got a lot of nice comments on Facebook.  That night I discovered to post an audio track on Facebook you have to do it as a reel, for people to be able to hear it.  With the help of ChatGPT I figured out exactly how to do that and at 2:45pm, I posted it on Facebook.  Immediately people began to comment and respond. The views added up quickly, but it was the number of shares that were surprising. People seemed compelled to share the song.   On Wednesday afternoon I also uploaded a copy to my YouTube Page.

Thirteen days later February 10, 2026, we are now at over 85,000 views on Facebook alone and over 2,300 people have shared the song, a share rate that is exceptionally high.  We have no idea where it goes from here.  People have asked where they can get a copy of the song?  It is now on every major music platform including Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora. This is all very new to me, I am learning as I go, fortunately I have an amazing team of experts who literally put other projects on hold when I called them and they worked 24/7 to create the site you are on right now and to get my song on the platforms in record time. I’m a 72-year-old grandfather of four, I cannot sing a note and have never played an instrument, and this is the only song I have ever written.  I’m a magician, not a musician.  But this time my it was my amazing team that was performing all the magic.

In the event there are any profits generated from this song, 25% of all net profits will be donated to the AMICA Center for Immigrant Rights, located in Washington, DC.  There they are doing the type of work Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were in the streets of Minneapolis protesting for when they ended up paying the ultimate cost.