Medellín

It's home to around a quarter of a million people, so it's pretty small, and it sits on Colombia's Caribbean coast, roughly equidistant between Santa Marta, where some of you may have been on holiday, and the Venezuelan oil-rich city of Maracaibo.

Just along the beach from Santa Marta is Barranquilla, which is Colombia's fourth largest city, behind Bogota, Medellin, and Cali, but it feels an is very different from those three places.

It would take almost a full day of driving, for example, to get from Bogota to Barranquilla.

So these Caribbean places have always felt politically distant from the Colombian state, but being the country's main maritime gateways into North America, Barranquilla and nearby Cartagena have been prime narco real estate ever since there was cocaine to transport out of Colombia.

So let's move on.

The Clan del Golfo have their power base in the west of Antioquia, which is a large department or province around the size of West Virginia.

Its capital city is Medellin, but it has this kind of slither of territory that slips all the way up to the Caribbean coast.

It's far from Barranquilla and Cartagena and close to the Panamanian border, right? So on the west of of Colombia's Caribbean coast, but it is a vital leg up for the clan's drug smuggling operations.

What's the story there?

So I have had a really special connection with Columbia and Medellín in particular.

for several years now.

I've played there many times, I've made so many friends there and I think my love for working with choirs is so deep.

I was playing a festival there in January this year and I just had this feeling I really wanted to work with a choir there and I knew that I wanted to work with younger voices.

I mean, I used to be in a choir when I was a kid And so I reached out to someone that I was working with that's from Medellín and just to ask if there was any sort of local kids' music schools.

And then within two hours, I was talking to the principal of Canto Alegre, which has the choir that I ended up working with.

And I have to say, there's something... having like the next generation singing lyrics that you've written hits in such a different way I think that it just gave everything it was super emotional I like blubbered my way through the two days because it's like I mean it's special hearing someone sing your lyrics anyway but like hearing this like big you know group of kids and their harmonies and how into it they were and like there's something about being this experience just felt so like hopeful I think and yeah and also because obviously like they're native Spanish like speaking Spanish as their like native language so we did one pass in English and then one in Spanish and we did like we switched up the words a little bit for because you know like with the cadence of words and how they make sense with songs and yeah so we changed the lyrics like a little bit just to suit the sort of rhythm i guess and um again it just like just added so much more kind of heart and meaning to it was an experience i'll never forget so