Calling Out! 📣
Sep 08, 2026
Hey,
I hope you’re doing well! This is my last missive from Tangier, as we’re flying back next Thursday, before heading to Hamburg on the following Monday… Time and I aren’t in a good relationship right now!
We’ve accomplished so many great things as we were here for several weeks this summer, and we all can’t wait to welcome you this November! This city is a place of its own on every possible level!
I’ll be live next Saturday, September 12, on Alex’s YouTube channel, where I’ll be presenting this year’s new theme, Old School packages, new contests, and so many other beautiful surprises!
Mark your calendars at 10am ET! :)
🎧 Music I’m listening to
Calling Out! by Alex Henry Foster
I mean…! For obvious reasons! :) And loud! Kinda very loud!!! :)
Listen to the Missive Playlist
📖 Reading highlight I’m pondering
Here’s the entire description of the song Calling Out! from Alex. He also wrote a little bit more about it in his most recent Substack publication.
Calling Out! has several different emotional layers entangled together. I tend to believe its first layer reflects the distressing yet overly confusing time we need to navigate in. There’s a social stream collectivizing our individual frustration and powerlessness… You want to be seen, touched, welcomed, and those fundamental human needs sure look like they are only fulfilled by activism and are more often than not weaponized by extreme views that no longer solely tap into the fringe or the margin of our different communities but galvanize their radicalization through the isolation and desperation plaguing us all, leading us to pick a side in the debate of the day and forcing us to tell everyone what our colors actually are…
Because if we don’t, others will say that we are such and such, essentially leaving them to determine who we are through their own prejudiced lenses, ultimately assigning us the uniform they see fit… And the distressing cycle goes on and on… In that sense, Calling Out! is about breaking that monochromatic view of ourselves and the world we are a part of. The song's personal layer muses on the acknowledgement that we all drift off from what we believe we are and what we truly became at some point in our lives…
No matter how much we feed the denial of our inner needs, there’s a conscious awakening that keeps on arising throughout our journey and calls us to get out of our self-imposed affective blur. Hopelessness is confronted with an instinctive desire to take another chance to start it all over again, to defy our defeating sense of gravity regardless of the emotional paralyzation we may accept to be trapped in. It leads to finding a way to keep on breathing despite the increasing measure of suffocation we go through a little more each day… as our existence doesn’t seem to be ours to dictate no more.
It's about emancipating our existence from the growing assumption that freedom implies for us to gain more and more control over things we can't comprehend, when the reality is somehow much more simplistic, since freedom only involves us letting go… I suppose that another layer, more subtle to those who haven't accompanied me closely over the last few years, has unconsciously seeped through the threads of the song, revealing a part of my recent life journey I otherwise fiercely keep to myself, something mirroring what I went through following double cardiac grafts that went terribly wrong and left me impaired for years with the loss of a large span of memories and souvenirs, the inability to speak, and the incapacity to write, read, and articulate ideas…
That prompted a lack of desire to connect with people and my surroundings until I ended up losing any willingness to project myself in the future. The "call out" in that case came from people’s affection and their healing love, one that led me from being frozen to awakened and finally risen, a process that could only take place once I had decided to embrace who I had become and to accept the new realm of reality it implied, decisions that crafted a path of self-exploratory liberation, which, once engaged in, would unveil the possibility to reinvent myself entirely… All this within the midst of denial, confusion, frustration, and desperation, transforming a bleak emotional fatalism into a beaming resurgence.
Unsurprisingly, Calling Out! has been the most challenging song for me to embody, from the writing to the production up to the mixing phase. Was it the highly revealing intimacy, its vulnerable rawness, or its direct conveying nature that made it so difficult for me to abandon myself to it, not to mention the relentless effort with which I tirelessly engaged in order to find its purest identity, giving life to countless transformations until there were no more shadowing traces designed to cover essential pieces of its revelatory lights, giving life to countless alterations…
It became an obsession to touch the intangible aspect of the song's most honest implied essence, driving every person involved crazy through every step of what felt like the endless and wearing form of a self-inflicting pilgrimage of pain and misery... This vividly expresses the conviction I had that Calling Out! not only had to be included on The Fragile Beauty (Of New Morning Hopes) but was also an essential element to the narrative cohesion of the whole record.
In that sense, after the release of the album's introductory single Springtime, it was obvious for me that Calling Out! had to be the following track, especially as I consider it to be the pivotal song of the voyage I invite people to partake in and redefine while assuming every single element of their secrets and to rewrite whatever part of their own stories…
Even if it implies starting it all over again.
🎙️ Podcast That Inspired Me
I recorded and filmed an Open Conversation with Alex around the song Calling Out! I’ll keep you posted on that very quickly for sure!
📸 My Picture of the Week
Alex and me at Cinema Riff.
Let’s be great to one another!
Your friend and Chief Operator,
Jeff
