Rebel with a Cause
New Haven Magazine – August 2008
By Michael C. Bingham

 
Lamont Hiebert is a musician on a mission.
 
Talk to the singer/songwriter, who fronts the New Haven-based band Ten Shekel Shirt, and a number of uncommon words keep popping up.
 
One is “abolitionist.”  No, he’s not looking to fight the Civil War all over again.  Instead, he’s on a mission to make great music, yes, but also to combat the sexual enslavement of young children around the world, which is some estimate may affect as many as 27 million young people, mainly (but not exclusively) in the developing world.
 
Hiebert is himself as a survivor of child abuse.  And although he declines to elaborate, he does allow that the experience “instilled something in me to protect others.”
 
Hiebert and his band are in publicity mode to promote a new CD, Jubilee, which will be released August 19 by Burlington, Mass.-based Rounder Records, and deals directly with the weighty issue of child abuse and exploitation.  It’s the band’s third release (the label says the first two sold 150,000 units), and represents a welcome return to performing for the 35-year-old Hiebert.
 
During the making of the band’s previous record, 2003’s Risk, Hiebert embarked on a “life-changing” trip to southeast Asia.  He accompanied undercover investigators into brothels where children as young as nine years old were enslaved and exploited.  On returning, he and a small group of friends founded Love146 (formerly Justice for Children International).
 
Love146’s work has earned the non-profit group a MySpace Impact Award for Social Justice, and the group was named an “Agent of Change” by GQ magazine.
 
“Rescue agencies informed us that more child slaves could be rescued if there were more aftercare services,” Hiebert explains. “Thankfully, we have been able to make room for many more of these precious children by expanding the number of safe homes and trauma counselors. Love146 also funds effective prevention efforts in southeast Asia making it harder for human traffickers to abduct children.”
 
Which points to another word that figures prominently in the Hiebert lexicon: “restore”—restoring children who have been victimized by sexual exploitation or forced into slave labor in developing countries.  Not “save.”  Not “heal.”
 
Restore. And Hiebert has made it a central focus of his life’s work.
 
“I took a number of years off from music to help start Love146,” he explains.  I wasn’t really planning on pursuing music full-time again; I was content with putting out little CDs on the side and focusing on the charity.  But when Rounder (A&R guy Troy Hansbrough) called and said, ‘We want to sign you,’ it was really out of the blue. Actually, it made me laugh.”
 
As in: I should be so lucky.
 
“I had written four or five songs with various themes from my work, so I got back to Rounder and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ Luckily at this point the charity has enough quality people here in New Haven and in southeast Asia, where most of the practical work is.”
 
Most of the tracks on Jubilee were co-written with longtime collaborator Jonny Rodgers, best known as co-prime mover (with his brother Steve) of legendary New Haven band Mighty Purple and someone “whose melodic prowess I coveted,” says Hiebert.  Hiebert and Rodgers recorded a number of demos in Hiebert’s basement, and after that the pair went to Nashville to record the bulk of the tracks, with additional recording taking place at Firehouse 12 in New Haven over the better part of a year.  “We actually recorded 18 songs,” Hiebert says, ten of which made the cut. “So we have a head start on the next record,” he adds.
 
Ten Shekel Shirt “is basically Jonny and I and a community of friends,” Hiebert explains.  Current drummer Colin Meyer and bassist Tim Sway round out the current lineup, will debut Jubilee at record-release party August 19 at Crash Mansion in New York City.  The band’s next local show is September 17 at SCSU.
 
Jubilee was co-produced by Hiebert and Nashville producer Brent Milligan, who also plays bass on the disc.  What does it actually sound like?  The record company refers to its “Coldplay/David Gray-esque sound,” but I’m not sure.  The music is lush, dense and almost orchestral.  There are hooks there, but they are subtle ones that surface only after repeated listenings.
 
Child abuse and exploitation is one theme of Jubilee, though not the only theme.  Of the album’s ten tracks, five address the issue directly, while the remainder, including the first radio single “Spark,” have “restorative” themes, Hiebert says.
 
Hiebert explains that his songwriting approach doesn’t necessarily begin with lyrics, melody or chord changes.  “I usually start with an idea,” he explains.
 
For example, the title track (“Jubilee”) represents “a merger of two ideas: One is the ancient meaning of the word ‘jubilee,’ which has to do with the emancipation of  slaves,” Hiebert explains. “I also had in mind the story of a girl who was in one of our safe homes in southeast Asia, and it’s about the first moments of the girl’s time in the safe home—her learning that sense of belonging again, and freedom and peace and love.”
 
Long ago I felt this love
And now I have a second chance
And I’m taking it.

Hiebert and Rodgers also co-wrote the music for one of Jubilee’s most powerful offerings: “Wartime Lullaby,” fueled by a martial drumbeat.  “There have been so many songs about war; I wanted to put myself in the place of someone who was in a city that’s being bombed,” he says.
 
Hiebert/Rodgers know their way around a catchy melody, and a lot of the songs have killer bridges that would do any really excellent pop stylist proud (with its hypnotic repeating piano figure, the bridge to “En Garde” stands out).  The production is pretty dense, although many of the songs employ dynamic contrasts utterly beyond the ken of most pop/rock practitioners.  As a song stylist Hiebert sometimes phrases things oddly (what a classical choir director would deride as “false accents”), but almost always manages to make it work.
 
That’s the music.  But it’s the message that Hiebert wants to stick with listeners.  In the metal-charged “It’s Slavery,” Hiebert puts himself in the place of a child prostitute:
 
Is that what you want?
Right here just like that?
I’ll give you what you want
‘Cause if I don’t I’ll get beaten.

In the powerful “You Rescue,” Hiebert writes of his rescuer—who may be temporal or not—“I will boast of your saving deeds/And I will rave of your glory”) whose language recalls Psalm 22 (“They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn/ The saving deeds that he has done”).  Speaking of which, some in the media have tagged Ten Shekel Shirt a “Christian” rock band—an appellation Hiebert is not entirely comfortable with.
 
“We are a band, and not everyone who travels with us is a Christian,” he says.  “I liked the revolutionary way Jesus led his life, and that kind of sums up my faith.  But I don’t really prefer the Christian label.
 
Still, his faith is central to both Hiebert’s music and his mission—he wants to save the world, while rocking it at the same time. He grew up in a Mennonite household in Grand Forks, B.C.—“a home where faith was important,” he says.  When Lamont was 19 his 21-year-old guitar-playing brother died, so he took up the instrument as his own partly in tribute.
 
But the seed of social activism was present from the beginning.  As a young adult he joined a faith-based Peace Corps-like group, Youth with a Mission.
 
He traveled the world to build clinics in places like the Amazon.  It was on that mission that he discovered that life for young people in the developing world could be a far cry from the sheltered childhood he had known in British Columbia.
 
Today, both his band and the non-profit he helped to found are working to improve and yes, restore the lives of those victimized by what some estimate to be a  $32 billion annual industry of enslavement and exploitation.  And whether you want to call Lamont Hiebert a “Christian” rocker or not, surely he’s doing God’s work—both onstage and off.