KAILUA-KONA — Kailua-Kona writer and musician Dennis Lee Foster has released a new song and music video titled “She Wanted It To Be Different” inspired by the heroin overdose death of a homeless woman in the drainage tunnels below Queen Kaahumanu Highway.
Foster said that reading the article in West Hawaii Today in July 2018 about Cheyanne Lee Anderson originally moved him to create a song and video about her tragedy.
“Researching homeless deaths among women in homeless camps and sleeping on the streets, I decided the video should be about them as well — not so much about how they died, but how they lived and what they must have felt,” said Foster.
He had written a poem for a poetry magazine starting with the line “She could have been an actress once, or a model, or a nurse,” not about a specific individual, but about all women whose lives led them into roles they never would have selected for themselves if they would have known the outcome.
“The song is also about all the women who wanted their lives to be different, but, one way or another, perished into homelessness — run over by a bulldozer, murdered in their sleep, or felled by malnutrition. Like my other songs, it’s a poetic expression in music and song, just as the video is a visual poem, movingly performed by those who contributed,” said Foster
The song is performed by his folk/rock jazz fusion group Kellian and Company. The video was filmed in Hawaii, California, London, Turkey, Australia and Japan and can be viewed on YouTube.
Foster is the author of over 65 published books. His paintings, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries. In addition, he has served stints as a lead guitarist, radio station disk jockey, corporate and commercial film producer.