Choose Your Condition is taken from the forthcoming Jack Cade album 'Bewilderland' due for release on 26 January 2024.
From the moment we enter the world we are fed and consume all manner of conditioning, it guides and helps us function in a society, informs our perceptions and sense of place in the world and how we engage with it, it drives our unthinking acceptance of some things, our decision making and the way we automatically react to certain situations. This song is a call to recognise and challenge the conditioning we all experience and the choices and decisions we make based on this conditioning. Enclosing ourselves in our own world with boxed in thinking is something we all experience. Only by listening and asking the question 'why' of ourselves, can we appreciate and start to understand where our opinions and reactions come from.
As Jack puts it. “ I am, like all of us, the product of my upbringing, the places I’ve lived, the family and friends around me, the media I consume, the lessons learned at school, in books and even comics. But the history we learn rather than experience, as a very old adage goes, is ‘written by the winners’, and as such, any uncomfortable truths and facts are buried, lost and polished out of existence. Like the title of the third song on the album, the last decade has been like a gradual ‘Awakening’ for me, a realignment of knowledge and a lot of the foundation blocks that make up my understanding of life and society, and my place in it. This album explores some of this awakening, from my roots growing up in a fading Victorian seaside town to the growing realisation that a lot of what I have taken for granted as being truth is far from it in my little bubble of life. All I can do now is strive to relearn and restructure, question more, open my mind to new ideas and truths, and build new perspectives. “
Jack is joined on the album by a talented bunch of musician Ben Cox-Smith on Dobro Slide Guitar, Hana Maria on Violin, Adam Perry and Mark Tudor drums.
