Teen’s ‘I Wear Your Words’ Video Inspires Nashville Songwriters

When she watched Kalanie Goldberg’s video, Nashville songwriter Bonnie Warren stepped back in time. The 13-year-old Goldberg was covered in adhesive-backed notes to telegraph to her bullies how the mean things they said about her stuck with her and deflated her confidence.

The recurring line in the Phoenix-area middle school student’s video, “every day I wear your words,” was especially haunting for Warren. Could she ever relate to how some kids feel when they’re singled out, ridiculed and, in some extreme cyberbullying cases, tormented to death. Now a seasoned and accomplished songwriter, Warren was bullied for some of the same reasons as Kalani as a high school student in the 1970s — because she was a “nerd” and “smart.” Her kids have been taunted by bullies, too.

“Manny, you’ve got to check this video out,” Warren told her songwriting partner Manny Cabo in March after seeing Kalani’s video in a story on Patch, where we’re taking a yearlong look at bullying and cyberbullying.

“We have to write this,” she said. “This is the next one.”

Warren and Cabo, a judges’ favorite, called a “four-chair turn,” on Season 9 of “The Voice,” had already collaborated on “Hate Has No Home Here,” a song they think is hip enough to gain a following with young audiences. (Get Across America Patch’s real-time news alerts and daily newsletter. Or, find your local Patch here and subscribe. Like us on Facebook. Also, download the free Patch iPhone app or free Patch Android app.)

“There are so many songs about terrible thing with violent lyrics,” Warren said. “Our job is that for every one of those songs, we put out an anti-bullying song written for them from the standpoint of a Top 40 profile, and that doesn’t have to be gimmicky to be poppy and cool.”

Cabo, who also has first-hand experience in the toll bullying can take on kids, didn’t need much of a nudge to take on the project with a singular, laser focus.

“At that age, there is so much peer pressure surrounding kids and how they look at you,” he said. “Looking at her with those stickers, I worry that kids are missing the whole point of the message, and they don’t understand they caused it.”

“Wear Your Words,” Cabo and Warren’s take on Kalani’s video, was released Sunday on YouTube and will be part of an upcoming album. Cabo calls it “the official anti-bully song.”

Read The Story That Inspired ‘Wear Your Words’

“It’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written,” Cabo said of the tribute to Kalani arranged and performed in the style of the late Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. “I visualized her sitting there with those notes all over her when I sang, absorbing every bit of pain that little girl went through and putting it in the song.”

For her part, Warren said the “mama bear” in her came out when she saw the 13-year-old’s video. She wanted to “reach into the screen and rip those sheets right off her.”

“It’s brilliant what she did. I had the same kind of visceral, oh-my-gosh reaction as when I saw that photo of the shoes on the Capitol lawn,” Warren said, referring to the 7,000 pairs of shoes that were placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn in mid-March to symbolize the 7,000 children who have died in gun violence since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

Cabo and Warren split their time between Nashville and their homes — Cabo in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Warren in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania. Neither is anybody the other thought they’d talk to. But they were thrown together at Global Songwriters Connection mixer in Nashville and Warren started peppering Cabo with questions. Before long, they discovered their shared passions.

“We are both very much about inspiration, positivity, unity and diversity,” Warren said.

The song is “bigger than us,” Cabo said. “It’s about the movement. We can raise awareness in the musical realm, but also in schools and cities and open people’s eyes that false judgments are the worst thing they can do. We’re proliferating the message, and if we can save one life, we’ve met our goal.”

SONGS HAVE ALWAYS INSPIRED CHANGE

The songwriters’ “Wear Your Words” project grew the more word got around about it in Nashville. Music producer David Browning, who has worked with musicians around the world in a variety of genres, from singer-songwriter Katy Perry to the late televangelist Billy Graham, was one of the first to sign on. Mark Thomas, a Tennessee Songwriters Association International winner, plays lead guitar, and Bill Worrell, the lead guitarist for the 1970s rock band America, is featured on acoustic guitar.

Experts say the people kids look up to — entertainers, athletes, politicians and other adults — can play a powerful role in changing the culture that allows bullying and cyberbullying to thrive. Cabo and Warren both feel an urgency to stand up and be present for kids and use their talents to make the world a more positive and safer place for them to grow up.

“So much positive change has been made with the start of a song,” Warren said. “It’s a special way to communicate that hits people where it counts. Hopefully, this sends some kind of message that help this young lady and all the other kids.”

Cabo and Warren’s first collaboration, “Hate Has No Home Here,” was written for bullies, to remind them of the consequences of their actions — whether their targets vent in a deadly shooting rampage or cut their own lives short with suicide.

“I’m 48, and I’m terrified to think of the thought of killing myself,” Cabo said. “It’s mind-boggling that they don’t understand the severity.”

Cabo and Warren are also teaming for a children’s song.

“We feel and we believe — it’s been researched that hate starts really early, at 2 or 3 when they start watching TV — in the need for a very simple song that young children can sing,” Warren said.

‘I HAVE DONE NOTHING TO YOU’

A refrain in “Wear Your Words” — I have done nothing, nothing, nothing to you — speaks to the bewilderment of kids when they realize the scorching insult isn’t a one-off, but part a pattern that will repeat again and again and again.

Warren spoke the exact words to her bullies as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, New York. She got good grades and kids wanted to cheat off her.

“I had more of a moral compass,” she said. “I told them I was happy to help them, but they just wanted to cheat.”

One day, one of the kids grabbed her swim cap and when she finally handed it back to Warren, she taunted “Bonnie smells.”

“That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said. “I stood up in the middle of the class and said, ‘I’ve done nothing to you. Why are you doing this?’

“She never bothered me again,” Warren recalled. “Everybody in class was really amazed.”

Happily, Kalani got similar results with her video. Her bullies didn’t apologize after her video captured worldwide attention, but they backed way off. Standing up for herself increased her confidence and ability to cope with bullies, she said.

THE MENACE OF BULLIES: PATCH SERIES

Throughout the coming year, Patch will look at the roles society plays in bullying and a child's unthinkable decision to end their own life in hopes that we might offer solutions that save lives.

Do you have a story to tell? Email us at [email protected].

• Bullied To Death: When Kids Kill With Words
• Bullying Addressed After Shocking Video Of Attack Surfaces
• Poetry Project Helps Bullied Kids Open Tortured Minds
• Bullies, Targets The Same In Surprising Number Of Cases

MORE RESOURCES

Read more about Manny Cabo.

Read more about Bonnie Warren.

Photo courtesy of Manny Cabo