written by Joe Harvard.
Lyrics are adapted from Prof. Annemarie Schimmel's translations of several poems by Jalaloddin Rumi, all of which can be found in her 1993 masterwork The Triumphal Sun.
google books/about/The_triumphal_sun.html?id=NvvUJtEC-lgC

Joe says: "Professor Annemarie Schimmel was one of the most, if not the most intriguing person I have ever met. Sunny Bhutto was a friend and student of Professor Schimmel's and it was through her that I learned of this Western woman who had been accepted by a Sufi order, and dedicated her life to studying the secrets of Islamic Mysticism -- and whose classes you could still take at Harvard in 1980, which seemed amazing to me. There were a lot of negative things to be found in the extremely conservative Harvard of that time ... but availability of world class academics was not one of them. It was like signing up for a class with Buddha or something."

"Professor Schimmel genuinely radiated light, she'd be reading -- if reading is the word for it, because she would only run her hand over the page with her eyes closed for most of her lectures -- a medieval Sufi poem or an esoteric tract describing angels or 'sants', and in total seriousness she herself looked as a Saint might be expected to, radiating a light. Her energy was palpable, lectures were otherworldly, for me at least. And her expertise made these often obscure concepts come alive. With a very quiet, measured way of speaking, still somehow the words of these poets seemed to burn on her lips, whether in Persian, Arabic or Urdu. Even musically I felt I was learning from her, like Jonathan Richman, that there was no need to shout, so to speak, either philosophically or musically."

"After Ali Bhutto was murdered and Sunny returned to Pakistan I had brought some stuff over to her, shipped a number of other trunks she'd had in storage to Karachi, and inherited a few trunks of books she didn't want, mostly text books from her undergraduate career at Harvard. Three years after returning from my third and final trip to Pakistan I was still absorbed in the Islamic world Sunny, and later her books had revealed to me. As I was working on songs I'd have the usual Boston garage thing in my head, and all my earlier British Invasion influences, but there was an increasing attraction to drones, to the sounds I'd heard and still pursued on record, plus I was reading a lot of Islamic material, had in essence 'minored' in Islamic culture at Harvard."

"I wanted to write a song about the Middle East, my position being what might be called pro-Palestinian, but which I regarded more as pro-Justice, with regard to the de facto apartheid in Israeli-controlled territories then. "Another Over There" came out of this same effort. Two books from Sunny's trunk influenced 'This Soil'. I had been reading the poetry of Palestinian resistance from her copy of 'Enemy of the Sun', and was going to adapt a poem by Mahmoud Darwish."
amazon Enemy-poetry-Palestinian-resistance-liberation/dp/0877825009

"I am not a protest song writer, and was attracted by Darwish's firm devotion to art over politics, expressed in his statement 'Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance'. I also respected his ability to maintain his efficacy in advocating for Palestinian rights despite that choice. but in the end a song is a song and goes where it will. These bits of Rumi I'd read in Professor Schimmel's book kept pushing up out of the grey matter, like shining objects I had to keep bending down to study. And then I was packing some stuff and had found a discarded appointment book in the trunk, mostly appointments but there were also quotes in the margins that Sunny had read or heard, and several of them were the same Rumi translations I recognized from Schimmel's book and from her class. In the end I used those pieces rather than a modern poem and strung them together to say what I wanted to. But I know I'll write a song one day with Darwish for lyrics."

"The Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer was a big old gray metal battleship of a drum machine, one of the first besides the mega-pricey Linn drum that let you play with the sound of the individual drums, tune them and so forth, and had lights that let you set up beats easily as well as accents, one click or two. I believe it has had a resurgence in popularity since the early 80's when I was using it. The Sex Execs had a Linn over at Contempt, super cool, it gets on a few So-So tracks eventually, and it was still around for Fort Apache ... but this 909 was like it's country cousin. Tune as I may, I could never get the kick to sound like anything but POOT."