“Reparations” is a poem from Kathryn Sparks’ cycle of poems Lullabies and Nocturnes. Composer Justin Binek loved the concept of the song cycle in classical music, and wanted to incorporate that multi-movement song form into the vocal jazz idiom. From the composer: “This is a song where the poetry wrote itself – the rhyme and meter lent itself to a bit of a neo-soul groove, and adding an Alicia Keys-ish harmonic progression underneath the lyric made everything flow in the most natural way possible.”