Peter Buffett's Passion: Music for a Cause

When you stop and think about it, we live in a pretty miraculous time. A time when music is at our fingertips, anytime we want it — downloadable from thin air at the click of a mouse or a few taps on the screen of an iPhone.

Even more miraculous? That something as easy and enjoyable as downloading new music could also provide a way to give back and do some good in the world.

That's exactly the case with "A Song For Everyone," a new collaboration between Emmy Award-winning composer/philanthropist Peter Buffett and Grammy Award-winning UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Angelique Kidjo. Downloads of the world-music/pop-rock duet, featuring lyrics in English and Kidjo's native Yoruba, support Kidjo's non-profit Batonga Foundation, dedicated to advancing young women's education in Africa.

How much can be done with a 99-cent download? A lot, it turns out. With 100-percent of proceeds going to the cause, as little as five downloads can buy a girl a school uniform or a new book bag. A thousand downloads will send a classroom of 45 girls to school for an entire year.

"It's so cool!" Peter Buffett tells Tonic. "You almost want to figure out how to download it 1,000 times and just send to friends. You could do a whole class for a year! But just a little bit can make something happen."

Buffett, the son of legendary investor Warren Buffett and a member of Tonic's board of creators, spoke with Tonic about how the collaboration came about — and how in recent years, almost by accident, he found himself becoming a writer of songs for a cause.

A Whole New World

Buffett's journey toward this latest charitable musical venture began four years ago, when his father decided to invest his fortune in philanthropy — and Peter and his wife Jennifer began the NoVo Foundation.

"Back when my dad did what I call The Big Bang, when he gave all his money away in June of 2006, when we were all traveling out together to make that announcement, one of the things he said to me , which completely confounded me, was, 'Do you think this will affect your music?' 'This' meaning, this much larger responsibility with the foundation," Buffett recalls. "I said, 'I have no idea. I don't see how it could, but I don't know!'"

"Little did I know, but with that incredible gift, responsibility, opportunity, whatever you want to call it, of course Jennifer and I really hunkered down for a couple of years to figure out how we wanted to operate, and where, and all the stuff you think about when you suddenly have this thrust upon you — and part of that was traveling."

Buffett found himself in Africa, coming face-to-face with the reality of the question his father had posed.

"My first trip to Africa was to Liberia and Sierra Leone. I had never been over, and sure enough I came home and I wrote a song. That's what I do. I experience something and write music. And that's a song that Akon actually heard, which led to us collaborating. He heard the song and wanted to contribute to it, so he kind of re-produced it and added a lyric and sang on the choruses and stuff. I didn't even know who Akon was at the time! But it really came out great."

That song was "Anything."

About six months later, on the heels of that project, Buffett was asked to write a song about human trafficking for an upcoming event at the UN, and also to bring Akon (seen with Buffett, left) along as a collaborator.

"I thought the idea of writing a song about human trafficking was about as weird [a request] as I'd ever heard," Buffett says with a laugh. "'La la la, we're going across the border.' What do you do? But coincidentally I met a guy that same night whose whole world is trafficking. And a couple days later he called me up and [brought up the theme of] Alchemy. 'People have been trying to turn things into gold forever, and isn't human trafficking and slavery turning blood into gold?' And I thought, 'Wow. There's a title.'"

He wrote the song "Blood Into Gold" that night, sent it to Akon, and their second collaboration premiered at the UN in 2009.

"Suddenly, I got into this mode of working with other people with songs for a cause, or a reason. I never like to force that stuff, but these things just sort of happened rather naturally," he marvels.

About a year ago, he found himself performing at the Global Philanthropy Forum in Washington, and the executive director of the Batonga Foundation happened to be present to hear him play — and insisted he meet Angelique Kidjo.

"I met Angelique (right), and my God — she is really a force of nature," Buffett says. "She's the real thing. She is something else, and of course supporting girls' education and her knowledge of what it means to support girls' education was what really got me excited about [the idea of collaborating]."

"You can talk to somebody about educating girls, and they feel good about it, and that's great. But what you learn when you go and experience this [in Africa] is that getting them in school almost doesn't even count. It's keeping them in school and doing all of the other factors around a girl that allows her to keep the trajectory of her own life in her own control. It's way more complicated," he says.

To put it into perspective, he explains: "When you go to Sierra Leone and you sit in a classroom, and you see this woman that sits in the classroom [in order to make sure] that sex isn't traded for grades, it's crazy. You see it first hand, and go, 'This is for real.'" (See Peter and Angelique talk about the cause in this video, below.)

"Talking with Angelique, she knew the deeper, more complex stuff" involved with educating girls in Africa, he says — and together, they knew they wanted to write a song that would send the message, without saying, "Let's send girls to school."

"How do you do it so it's not so 'on-the-nose' that it's just stupid?" Buffett says with a laugh.

The process of songwriting with a new collaborator is always a bit of a mystery, too.

"Normally with Akon, I wrote the song and then he would contribute. That was easy for me. I wasn't having to rise to somebody else's esthetic or something. But with this one, she sent me the track — I totally did not expect it — with her singing this stuff in her language and she said, 'Here, come up with something.' It totally intimidated me. It's not my style. I'm thinking, 'I don't even know where to begin.' So I ignored it for a couple of weeks and then finally said, 'I've got to give this a shot.'

Buffett sat down, and got to work, and within three hours, he had something.

"Afterwards, I heard from Angelique and John, her husband, that they thought I hated the track because they didn't hear from me for two weeks!" Buffett laughs. "I was like, 'Are you kidding? I was completely freaking out not knowing what to do!"

"Luckily, they really liked it, and I went into her studio to finish it up, and that's what you hear," he says.

Songs for a Cause

In a strange way, writing songs with a message, and songs for a cause, was a natural progression for Buffett.

"I was never in a band in high school or anything. I never wrote songs to just say 'look at me' and 'look what I did.' That was never my thing. I always wanted the music to do something. The way I started was writing music for commercials — that way the music could be a part of something, I could get paid decently and it was a job. I felt like I was in the service industry really. I didn't think of myself as a songwriter. But at least I was part of a larger thing somehow. That then that turned into music for film and television — it's cool to help advance a story, to be a dramatic component or something.

"I didn't start to sing at all until 2005, which is also kind of weird," he points out.

At his second-ever live vocal performance, at a small gathering, Eve Ensler happened to be sitting at Jennifer's table — and the creator of The Vagina Monologues asked him, right then and there, if he would come sing at the tenth anniversary of V-Day.

So his third-ever vocal performance was in a stadium in New Orleans full of 17,000 people.

"It's weird how life can sweep you up and take you places," he notes.

One of the songs Ensler heard that fateful night was "Anything," from his second album — the same song that led to the collaborations with Akon, and eventually led him to "A Song for Everyone."

"So it's all been a natural progression," Buffett says. "But still a surprise. I just kind of keep falling into these experiences."

To fall into the experience of giving back by downloading new music, log on to the music store at Peter Buffett's website.

"A Song for Everyone" is also available on iTunes, where it can be gifted to others.

The Batonga Foundation also accepts donations via the Web.

Photos courtesy Peter Buffett

Video courtesy DoSomething.org