A 2025 Grammy nominee, A Change Is Gonna Come provokes conversation, confronts the past and present, and celebrates the act of protest as one of humanity’s most precious rights. 

Featuring Palaver Strings, Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan, and jazz vocalist Farayi Malek, A Change is Gonna Come explores our country’s rich legacy of protest songs. Repertoire includes traditional songs of protest and music inspired by social movements and historical events, including Nico Muhly’s Stranger, Akenya Seymour’s Fear the Lamb, and the premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s Protest Songs. Read more about the album here.

About the Lifesongs Project

To celebrate the album's release, Palaver Strings and Nicholas Phan have launched a 3-day residency project and performance that explores collaborative music-making, storytelling, and protest through song by involving local community members in writing their own stories with Palaver's Lifesongs Project. 

This 3-day residency will explore the expressive potential of collaborative music-making, storytelling, and protest through song, and how themes of hope and justice can connect us with each other. The project will centre around Grammy-nominated album A Change is Gonna Come  while working closely with local community members to write their own stories through the lens of Palaver's Lifesongs Project. Presenters can choose which community, and which members within that community, would benefit most from participating in the Lifesongs songwriting workshop.  Examples of communities could include: an LGBTQ group, an Osher lifelong learning group, an Alateen group, a group of inmates pursuing higher education degrees, etc. 

After a day of songwriting followed by a day of revision/demoing, Palaver and the community songwriters will offer a culminating public performance of the songs, as well as the process-sharing discussion.

Day 1: Lifesongs songwriting workshop. Palaver musicians will work with 3-5 members of the community of your choice to write songs about their life stories or issues that are important to them.

Day 2:  Lifesongs songwriting revision session and creation of take-home demo recordings. Palaver musicians and participating community members will finish the songs and record demo recordings for the community member's personal use.

Day 3: Lifesongs live performance and process-sharing session with public audience, followed by a culminating Change is Gonna Come performance by Palaver Strings and Nicholas Phan

A Change is Gonna Come

Repertoire on the album includes traditional songs of protest and music inspired by social movements and historical events, including a new commission by Errollyn Wallen titled Protest Songs, sung by Phan. Eight of the thirteen tracks on the album are heard in arrangements by Attacca Quartet’s Domenic Salerni.

The centerpiece of A Change Is Gonna Come is the world premiere recording of Errollyn Wallen’s “Protest Songs”, commissioned for this project in 2021. An award-winning, Belize-born British composer and performer, Wallen herself wrote the text for the first movement, setting the second to a text by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an abolitionist and one of the first Black poets published in the United States.

The album has been nominated for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album for the 67th Grammy Awards.

“It has been the greatest privilege to compose for Nicholas Phan and Palaver Strings. I am delighted that my new work, Protest Songs, is included on this important album.”

– Errollyn Wallen

Repertoire

Nico Muhly – Stranger
Roberta Slavitt, Alfred Hayes, Malvina Reynolds, arr. Domenic Salerni – Freedom is a Constant Struggle/I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill/It Isn't Nice
Harry Burleigh/ Langston Hughes, arr. Ian Gottlieb – Lovely, Dark and Lonely One
Abel Meeropol/Billie Holiday, arr. Jonathan Bingham – Strange Fruit
Akenya Seymour – Fear the Lamb
Bob Dylan, arr. Domenic Salerni – Blowin’ in the Wind
Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, arr. Domenic Salerni – Fiddle and the Drum/Where Have all the Flowers Gone/What Are You Fighting For?
Errollyn Wallen – Protest Songs (Project Commission)
Sam Cooke, arr. Domenic Salerni – A Change is Gonna Come