Beautiful Strangers at the Bataclan

by Kevin Morby

I was listening to the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup, running on a treadmill, when a television in the gym said BREAKING with a blood-red banner. A mass shooting was unfolding in Paris, in real time, at a music venue called the Bataclan.

This was 2015, and I was at home in Kansas City. I’d never heard of a mass shooting taking place in Europe, much less at a show. I had believed, perhaps naively, that the sanctity of music itself was a forcefield from evil, but I was wrong.

A year after the shooting, I wrote and released a song called “Beautiful Strangers,” which references the tragedy at the Bataclan, along with the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando and the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The song has arguably become my most popular, and though it’s been seven years, its rise within my catalog is a testament to our ever-horrendous current events. Its subject matter of mass shootings and police brutality has aged all too well.

The first time I performed “Beautiful Strangers” in …