Tag: protest songs

Like Woody Guthrie Before Them, Roots Musicians Take on Trump through Song

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If there are two American figures one would least expect to be connected, they may well be Woody Guthrie and Donald Trump. Guthrie, one of the most revered political songwriters ever to put pen to paper, has next to nothing in common with Republican presidential nominee Trump, a man who represents everything against which Guthrie fought as a folk singer and activist. But the two do have one connection: Trump’s father, the late New York real estate mogul Fred C. Trump. 

In the early 1950s, Guthrie was briefly a tenant of Trump’s Beach Haven apartment complex, a Brooklyn property the elder Trump developed using an FHA subsidy specifically designated for affordable public housing. Years after Guthrie moved out of Beach Haven, in 1964, Trump would be investigated for profiteering, having, as Will Kaufman wrote in a story on Guthrie and Trump for The Conversation earlier this year, “overestimat[ed] his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of $3.7 million.” And in 1973, six years after Guthrie’s death from Huntington’s disease at the age of 55, Trump was sued by the Justice Department for discriminating against Black people, eventually settling outside of court.

“In 1950, Woody and his family rented an apartment in the complex called Beach Haven that was owned by Fred Trump,” Deana McCloud, Executive Director of Tulsa’s Woody Guthrie Center, says. “After they moved in, it came to [Guthrie’s] attention that the elder Mr. Trump would not lease apartments to African-Americans, which did not sit very well with Woody, as an advocate for civil rights.”

It was the racism of “Old Man Trump” that stoked the most intense anger in Guthrie, inspiring him to write two sets of writing — the first being the better known “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” a re-working of an existing Guthrie song called “Ain’t Got No Home” and one that is often referred to as “Old Man Trump,” and the second, “Racial Hate at Beach Haven.” Both writings are available on view at the Guthrie Center and, since Kaufman’s piece was published, have been fodder for outlets as large as NPR and the New York Times, once again relevant in light of the 2016 election. As seen in the images provided by Kaufman, Guthrie punctuated his lyrics with exclamation points, a seemingly small detail that McCloud finds very telling.

“What’s really interesting for me is, I looked at the lyrics for ‘Beach Haven Ain’t My Home’ and — of course, we have thousands of examples of Woody’s handwriting and very seldom does he use exclamation points — in this particular lyric, every line is followed by an exclamation point,” she says with a slight laugh. “His emotions are very apparent in the lyrics. It was just an issue with him, the idea that people should be separated and kept apart in anything, but especially when it comes to allowing them to live together and learn together and cooperate with each other.” 

A reimagined “Old Man Trump,” recorded by Santa Barbara band U.S. Elevator, made its way into current headlines just a few days ago as part of the “30 Days, 30 Songs” project, an initiative spearheaded by acclaimed author Dave Eggers (famous for works like 2000’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and the more recent novel A Hologram for the King; he also documented his time at a Sacramento Trump rally for the Guardian) and Zeitgeist Artist Management’s Jordan Kurland, who is known for his integral role in the careers of artists like Death Cab for Cutie and Bob Mould. The project, which kicked off October 10, is a playlist of anti-Trump songs, proceeds from which will benefit the Center for Popular Democracy, written and/or performed by a diverse roster of artists that includes Aimee Mann, Jim James, R.E.M., and Adia Victoria. At press time, the initiative has grown to become “30 Days, 40 Songs,” and could continue to grow larger as Election Day draws nearer. “30 Days” follows the pair’s 2012 effort “90 Days, 90 Reasons,” a series of essays by figures like Roxane Gay and George Saunders that argued for the re-election of President Barack Obama. 

“One of the things that really struck [Eggers] about the rally was the music that was being played,” Kurland says. “It was so off-base from Trump’s message, you know? It was Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ or Bruce Springsteen or the Who — clearly just songs that didn’t make sense contextually, but also songs that there’s no way the artists would have approved. So Dave came back with the idea to get artists to write songs that should be played at Trump rallies, with that meaning they could be songs either directly about Donald Trump or songs that celebrate all the things that Donald Trump is against, like diversity and freedom of speech, etcetera, etcetera.” 

Nashville artist Adia Victoria — who speaks powerfully on race, class, and Southern culture in both her music and in interviews — contributed the sparse, sobering “Backwards Blues” to the playlist. When sharing the song on Facebook, she wrote, “Perhaps the greatest irony is how a campaign fueled by outright lies reveals a deep-seated kernel of truth of what far too many Americans hold up as sacred: massive wealth, the sway of celebrity, branding, power, and greed. I don’t want to say that he’s the president we deserve, yet here we are.”

Many other musicians outside of the “30 Days” project have found themselves getting political in recent months, too. Ani DiFranco recently released the song “Play God” which, while not overtly anti-Trump, champions women’s reproductive rights, a message that flies in the face of Trump’s endlessly mysognistic rhetoric and behavior. “As we prepare for our first woman president, isn’t this the perfect time for all of us to put women’s civil rights into law?” DiFranco asks. “Make reproductive freedom a Constitutional amendment. With the Supreme Court in flux, we cannot afford to leave our rights in the balance.”

Revered Nashville/Austin songwriter Radney Foster contributed to the conversation with “All That I Require” — what he describes as an “anti-fascism history lesson” that, to name only one example, feels especially chilling in light of Trump’s third debate comments about his reluctance to concede the election were Clinton to win the presidency. 

“The voices of extremism and fascism are ringing more loudly in our national debate than ever before in my lifetime,” Foster says. “Questioning the free press and the peaceful transition of power never ends well. All of the sloganeering in the song are taken from Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco — demagogues from the right and the left. I hope the song is something that will make us all, Democrat or Republican, do some soul-searching about what kind of country we want to be.”

One of the most powerful, acclaimed albums of 2016, the Drive-By Truckers’ latest release American Band, was described by Slate‘s Carl Wilson as “the perfect album for the year of Trump.” DBT songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley address a number of difficult topics, including racism, immigration, and police brutality, on the LP, with songs like “Ramon Casiano” and “What It Means” two standouts (among a consistently stellar batch of songs) whose narratives have chilling parallels: The first describes the death of Mexican teenager Ramon Casiano at the hands of Harlon B. Carter; the second refers to the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman, as well as cases like the police killing of Michael Brown. The album grapples with many of the very issues for which Trump stands, providing alternative viewpoints from, as Wilson describes, a group of men “embodying the stereotypical demographics of a Trump voter (white, male, middle-age, non–college-educated).”

Akron, Ohio, songwriter Joseph Arthur released his anti-Trump number, “The Campaign Song,” which juxtaposes audio and video of clips of Trump shouting catchphrases like “Build That Wall” with lyrics like “Trump is a chump,” earlier this month and invoked Guthrie’s legacy as a political songwriter, as well as his unfortunate connection to the Trump family. “Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song about Donald Trump’s grandfather,” Arthur wrote on his website. “So this is like carrying the torch for Woody. I used the lingo of a by-gone era to accentuate that aspect like ‘America really should boot bums like this out’ and ‘Old scratch’. I wanted to use the lingo of Trump’s elders as subtle form of linguistic manipulation designed to send him under his bed shivering like the whimpering maggot that he is.”

A particularly biting critique of Trump, his policies and his deeply flawed Trump University comes from folk singer/songwriter Anthony D’Amato, who released the song “If You’re Gonna Build a Wall” and its accompanying video via MoveOn’s Facebook page last week. D’Amato was inspired to write the song, which references Trump’s desire to build a wall between Mexico and the United States and includes lines like “Oh if you’re gonna build a wall / You better be ready the day it falls,” after covertly attending a Trump Rally in Long Island.

“I wrote this song last Summer during the primaries,” D’Amato says. “I was home from tour with a broken finger and bombarded by election news every day. The rhetoric was dark and divisive and ran counter to a lot of the ideals I always felt like this country was built on. Trump’s campaign was the initial spark, but the song touches on race and class and privilege, too. History doesn’t look kindly on those who build themselves up by excluding  and demonizing the less powerful. If you’re going to do that, you’d better be prepared for the consequences.”

Pioneer Valley band Parsonsfield also felt compelled to write about Trump’s hypothetical wall, expressing their frustration in the song “Barbed Wire,” a stirring track off their recently released album Blooming through the Black. “It’s funny how the loudest voices championing freedom are the ones who want to erect the clearest symbol of restrictiveness,” the band’s Chris Freeman says. “It will never happen, but the rhetoric is frightening enough. The song references the wall in the sense that they are often built as a mechanism to keep others out. The builder usually fails to see that they are also the ones being kept in.”

Like his father’s before him, Donald Trump’s policies seek to exclude rather than unite. And like Guthrie before them, today’s musicians are using their platforms to voice progressive platforms, the latest entrants into the long, continually evolving songbook of American protest music. Protest music is most commonly attributed to the 1960s — just look at this year’s somewhat unusual, certainly polarizing winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — but it’s a tradition that’s been around in America for centuries. To name just two, non-’60s American milestones that birthed political music, the Civil War inspired a number of tunes, including “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Song of the Abolitionist”; and the gay rights movement of the ’80s and ’90s brought us “Rebel Girl” by Bikini Kill and “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper.

Trump is, of course, not the first politician to inspire musicians’ ire (and he certainly won’t be the last), although he has accomplished the not-so-desirable feat of doing so before the election results have even been tabulated. Bright Eyes, Radiohead, and, perhaps most famously, the Dixie Chicks were among the many artists who called out 43rd President George W. Bush through song. Ronald Reagan had the Ramones and Prince as detractors. And, in case you thought musicians only targeted Republicans, Democratic President Bill Clinton’s indiscretions have been documented by artists as high-profile as Beyoncé — though it’s important to note that Monica Lewinsky is often, problematically, the target, instead of Clinton himself. 

“The way that music makes a difference in society is still apparent today,” McCloud says. “You still have those people who are raging against injustice and we know that Woody’s work is as relevant today as it was whenever he was writing it. The specific names might have changed a little, some specific details may have changed. But when you look at the lyrics that Woody wrote, and that Pete Seeger wrote, and Phil Ochs wrote, we’re still struggling with this huge divide between the people who have so much and those who struggle just to get by every day.”

And while many artists choose to express political views through song, others take stances by withholding their music from candidates with whom they disagree. Just this year, the Trump campaign has received cease and desist letters (or, some cases, some very angry rhetoric) from the Rolling Stones, Adele, R.E.M. (who, along with Sleater-Kinney, just released their own “30 Days” tune), and several other artists regarding the usage of their songs at Trump rallies and events. 

“Music and protest, for a very long time, have gone hand in hand,” Kurland says. “For this particular project, it’s to get people inspired about the election or voting that have maybe been somewhat apathetic to it. Certainly Bernie Sanders captured a lot of people’s attention and imagination amongst younger voters and it just felt like, in May or June, there were people who were disappointed and people who weren’t really seeming like they were very engaged. So the idea of doing this is a way of getting people motivated by hearing a well-written song about an important topic. The goal with this project, and the other projects we’ve worked on in the past, is to appeal to younger voters who maybe don’t fully grasp the importance of this election or understand how different the two candidates really are. I get so sick of hearing, ‘Hillary is the lesser of two evils.’ That couldn’t be further from the truth.” 

While Guthrie isn’t alive to sing us through these last few weeks leading up to election day, many of the issues for which he fought are, unfortunately, still issues today. McCloud believes he would have been just as disappointed by Donald’s political rhetoric as he was by Fred’s housing practices. “I certainly don’t want to put my thoughts into Woody’s voice by any means, but based on my knowledge of what he wrote and his perspective of things, I think, like many of us, it would be deeply troubling to him to see the lack of civility and the divisive nature of today’s political climate,” she says. “This idea of getting together, walking together, talking together, solving problems is almost nonexistent in what we see today, and I think that would be deeply troubling to him.”

Though it appears as though Hillary Clinton has all but clinched the election, the work to heal from and evolve past the divisive, racist, bigoted rhetoric in which the United States became ensnarled throughout this election is only just beginning. It’s another chapter in a long, bloody story that is centuries long — one that Guthrie, like his modern counterparts, immortalized in song, offering small glimpses of hope, wisdom, and catharsis for all of us hoping for a better world. 

McCloud sums up Guthrie’s feelings — which were messy, uncomfortable, unresolved, but ultimately hopeful — when she recounts his writing “Racial Hate at Beach Haven.” “What I really love is the way he ends it,” she says. “The last paragraph — it’s so lyrical. It’s, ‘Let’s you and me shake hands together and get together and walk together and talk together and sing together and dance together and work together and play together and hold together and let’s get together and fight together and march together until we lick this goddamned racist hate together, what do you say?’ That’s Woody. He was upset. He was angry. But he still understood that this is a problem, and let’s sit down and talk about it and solve the problem instead of just being separate and having our own opinions. Let’s solve the problem.” 

Lede photo courtesy of U.S. Consulate General Munich from Germany and Joseph Arthur

The Producers: Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer

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Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer have devised a clever game to play when they’re traveling — something to keep their ears sharp, when they’re away from their home studio outside Washington, D.C. “We’ll go into a room,” says Marxer. “Big room or small, it doesn’t matter. We’ll clap our hands and see if we can figure out what reverb setting we would need to copy that sound. It’s geeky all the way.”

The pair have visited a lot of rooms together over the years. For nearly four decades, they’ve been playing and recording and touring together: Fink is one of the best banjo players alive, and Marxer plays nearly everything else. They’ve released 45 albums covering a range of styles and set-ups, mostly folk and old-time, bluegrass and children’s tunes. Their latest, Get Up and Do Right, is their first collection of duets for two voices and two acoustic instruments, featuring a handful of originals and covers of songs penned by Alice Gerrard, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan.

Gently political and certainly timely, the album digs into folk’s enormous capacity for dissenting voices combining in beautiful harmony. For Fink and Marxer, making music is a way to get up and do right: an inherently radical act. Their DIY process extends into the studio, where they work as their own producers and, occasionally, their own engineers and mixers. Marxer is the more technical-minded of the two (see below for her favorite piece of equipment), while Fink is the conceptualist — the one who keeps the big picture in perspective. Together and separately, they have produced roughly 150 records, including Sam Gleaves’ 2015 breakout Ain’t We Brothers and Tom Paxton’s new album, Boat in the Water.

What unites this disparate catalog is a warmth of sound and an idea of music as a communal undertaking, a labor and a joy to be shared. “We both do many things and wear many hats,” says Marxer. “Sometimes we produce together and sometimes separately.” Adds Fink: “Even when we have separate projects, we have an open door with each other for what we call continuous consulting. It’s pretty hard for one of us to get involved in something where the other person doesn’t have some influence to make it better.”

How did you move into the role of producer?

Cathy Fink: We’ve both been playing music professionally since the early 1970s and, in the early days, I had the opportunity to work with some really great producers. Two who were very influential on me were David Essig and Ken Whiteley, both from Canada. Ken has produced probably 2,500 albums over the last 40 years. In both cases, I was a musician who was confident in what I wanted to accomplish, but didn’t feel like I had the knowledge to take my dream and get it on tape. By working with lots of producers I really trusted and whose music I enjoyed, I was able to pay attention to how they accomplished things. After a few projects like that, it was time for a transition, so I did an album where I co-produced. Marcy was involved, along with a lot of other people, and I bounced ideas off them. As we continued working together, we really relied on each other to the point where most of these things became co-productions.

Marcy Marxer: I started out very differently. When I was a kid, my dad used to go to the junkyard and collect wires and speakers and thermostats and things like that. He’d come home and give them to me to take apart and look at. When I was in the eighth grade, I built my first tube amp. That really developed the techno-geek side of my brain. Eventually, I got a job with Macmillan/McGraw-Hill producing 120 songs for an educational project. Since then, Cathy and I have been able to join forces, and it just mushroomed. We push each other to get better. We have a bit of a competitive streak, but it works in our favor.

It sounds like together you cover nearly every aspect of the recording process.

CF: You don’t need to be an engineer to be a good producer, but we found it so helpful to get those skills in order to better speak with the engineers we were working with. It really rounded out our abilities, and I’m in a better position to know what I’m looking for, how I might get it, and whether or not we’re getting it. In turn, we try to pass that along to other people. Our Grammys actually say Artist, Engineer, and Producer.

MM: It’s crucial to know every step, but it’s not crucial to do every step. It’s good to have a bigger team, people you trust, people who are fast at certain things, people who are the house painters of their field or the Rembrandts of their field. If we didn’t play and engineer and produce and mix, I don’t think we could efficiently speak with the other team members.

CF: We do lots of projects that we don’t engineer on. The reason we started engineering really had to do with a combination of convenience and health issues a long time ago. We wanted to do these things at home and at our own convenience. When you’re traveling as much as we do, we would sometimes book a date in the studio, and then the day would come and, oh man, we’re just too tired to do that today. So we learned to do our own tracks and our own overdubs at home. It gives us a whole new way of producing our own projects. Time is a big factor, so if we have two weeks to make an album, we’re not going to sit in the studio with all of the crayons and start creating the painting. We’re going to visualize the painting before we go in, and then we’re going to take the right steps to make it happen. When we do it all at home, we have the opportunity to take out all the crayons and try out different colors. We might do a take with different banjos or different harmonies and decide which one works better for a particular track.

Is that how you made Get Up and Do Right?

CF: Most of it was recorded in our home studio. There were two tracks recorded live at AirShow, and there are two tracks recorded at Jim Robeson’s studio. We wanted to do those tracks live, but didn’t want to have to deal with the mechanics of being engineers at the same time. Everything else was done at home, sometimes live, sometimes overdubbed, but always with the feeling of, “This is what it sounds like when we play together.”

MM: The great thing about the studio at home is that all of my instruments are here. When I’m working on other people’s projects, I might be doing some overdubs or filling some holes, and I’ll just fill up the car with instruments and see what I can do to finish it up. If I didn’t bring an instrument with me, then I can’t use it. So it’s much easier having everything in one place.

CF: We don’t have to think ahead to which five guitars we might need. If we’re at home, we can go, “What this song really needs is the electric baritone guitar,” and we can run and get it. But if we’re at someone else’s studio, too bad. We recently produced Tom Paxton’s newest album, and we worked with our engineer Jim Robeson at his studio. Tom did all of his tracks there, and a lot of other people came in, but when it came time to do our own tracks, we decided to do them at home. Another example is the project we did called cELLAbration!, which was a tribute to Ella Jenkins that includes an amazing array of artists, including Sweet Honey in the Rock, Red Grammer, and Riders in the Sky. I’d say about 60 percent of that album was done in a variety of commercial studios and about 40 percent was done at home. It’s a really fun way of filling out the whole puzzle.

Something that strikes me about your new album and Paxton’s new album is how rich and complex the instruments sound.

MM: We mic all the instruments in stereo. We almost never single-mic an acoustic instrument because we want it to sound like we’re listening with both of our ears. Both of those albums are so sparse, and you really want to hear all the detail. If something was going to sound really big, we might be inclined to leave it off. We want you to feel like you’re sitting in a living room with us — a really nice-sounding living room.

CF: We don’t have a giant collection of gear, though. What we’ve found is that we’re very good at using a handful of things, so we stick with a couple of mics that sound fabulous. We know how to deal with them, and sometimes we’ll cart them around, if we go to another studio. What you’re most familiar with is usually what you’re going to sound best with. I just have to give a huge amount of credit to Greg Lukens and Jim Robeson for the incredible tutelage they gave us. There aren’t a lot of female engineers who are well known, and we’ve certainly worked in a lot of studios where it was assumed that we couldn’t possibly know what we were talking about. But Greg and Jim really empowered us to do all of this stuff for ourselves.

MM: Every once in a while, I’ll be working with an engineer that I might not be very familiar with, somebody that I might not have a lot of faith or trust in or just might not know very well. If there’s a man in the room, then all the production questions will be addressed to him instead of me. It seems impossible in this day and age, but it does happen. I’ve stopped working with people like that, people I don’t absolutely trust. I’m not the kind of person who will put my foot down and demand something. Cathy is a little bit better at that, but I just try to avoid those people.

You seem to be at the center of a very large musical community, which reflects in the music itself — not just who’s on the record, but how those people interact.

CF: It is a very large, very close musical community in the D.C. area. One of the advantages of working in a place like this is that, when people think of where the hotbeds of music are in the United States, they may pinpoint New York or Los Angeles or Nashville. But in D.C., there isn’t such a competitive atmosphere. When I moved to town, I was welcomed into the world of session players and there wasn’t really a hierarchy. Musicians are very supportive of each other, and the engineering world, in particular, is not competitive at all. If one person has a problem, everybody’s going to help them out.

The other thing is, we have a pretty active touring schedule both nationally and internationally, so we’ve had a good time making that community even bigger. Twenty-two years ago, we played at the Auckland Folk Festival in New Zealand, where we met a couple of musicians that we’ve remained friends with all these years. One of them is Chris Newman, and the other one is a traditional harp player named Máire Ní Chathasaigh. We’ve played on their records through the magic of the Internet. And we just got back from a UK tour, where we did 10 days with Tom Paxton and then a week in the Orkney Islands in Scotland. Talk about off the beaten track. Our friends Hazel and Jennifer Wrigley have spent 10 or 15 years touring nonstop around the world as a fiddle and guitar duo playing traditional Scottish music. They’re just spectacular. They settled back in their home of Orkney to open up this place called Wrigley and the Reel, which is a music shop, café, venue, and educational facility. We’ve played on their records and, when they come to the States, they stay with us. So the community just gets larger and larger.

MM: We also find that when we meet other producers and engineers, they’re thrilled to discuss equipment and show you their gear. It can get pretty geeky. And if you’re wondering, my favorite preamps are simple and easily accessible. They’re APIs, and we use a full preamp rack mount that would sell online for $2,500 or something like that. They’re absolutely clear, beautiful, pristine sounds.

CF: We do get buried in the geekiness, but we try not to forget that what we’re really doing here is using the medium as a way to share the music that we love. When we produced Get Up and Do Right, we wanted to use all that gear to highlight the music — the feeling of the music and the message of the music. There is always something to discover and that’s what makes it fun.

MM: I’ll tell you two of my favorite recordings. One is Cowboy Calypso by Russ Barenberg. The vinyl sounds absolutely gorgeous. The other, which was done digitally, is John Fogerty’s Blue Moon Swamp. And anything Gary Paczosa produces always sounds beautiful.

There is something very direct about the music on this album, something very refreshing about its optimism during hard times.

CF: We have to stay optimistic. On our tour of the UK, we played to about 4,500 people, and the song “Get Up and Do Right” was a rabble-rouser every single night. It’s a song we loved, when we heard it two years ago and, when we recorded it, no one thought Donald Trump was going to win the election. We just knew that it was a great daily meditation, but we didn’t realize that it could be this ultimate rallying cry. I just finished a down-and-dirty video for the song that’s based on pictures that people sent us from marches all over the world. We went to a march in Kirkwall, in the Orkneys, a very tiny place, and the first night we’re there, there’s a vigil in front of the local church. We were very welcomed. When we got there, Marcy announces, “We’re Americans and we’re with you!” That got a big cheer, and we made a bunch of friends. It feels like our job every day is to get up and do right. Do the best we can to make the Earth a good place to live. Negativity breeds negativity. Action breeds positivity. Rather than get bogged down in the negative stuff, we’re just going to continue to get up and do right.

MM: Cathy and I are old enough to have lived through the civil rights movement, so we’ve done this before and we’ve come out better than we were for it. My parents went to marches, and it was really the music that kept us moving forward. It was the music that brought everyone together and kept us going. This was back when you used to have to dress up in your Sunday clothes and your Sunday shoes for a march. For a little kid, that’s not easy. But music gave us support and energy. Something happens when everybody is singing at the same time. They all take a breath at the same time, and that’s power. It’s real power.

Can you tell me how that sense of social responsibility informs your children’s music, especially the Children of Selma album from 1988?

CF: Children of Selma is a project that I still deeply love. I was brought to that project by Jane Sapp who was, at the time, working with the Highlander Center. That’s the place where Rosa Parks went for a workshop two weeks before she wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. Jane had met a woman named Rose Sanders who had worked with a group of kids after school in Selma. Rose is a civil rights attorney, but her purpose was to give the kids something useful to do after school. She turned out to be quite a prolific and incredible songwriter. I went down there and we went to an old YMCA or community center, where there was an out-of-tune piano, and Rose gathered the kids around to sing a bunch of these songs. I was blown away by the spirit of these songs and by the magic that happened when she engaged the kids who were singing about their real lives. One of the songs that comes back to me every election is “Vote for Me Until I Can.” That project was a big challenge: I had to go to a location where I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t know how to take a group of kids, who had never recorded before, into a studio. But the important part was taking their message to a bigger audience. Even though, commercially, it’s one of the least successful things I’ve done, in my heart, it’s one of the most important projects I’ve ever worked on.

Photo credit: Michael Stewart

Counsel of Elders: John McCutcheon on Telling Powerful Stories

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In late 2015, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist John McCutcheon received the kind of news capable of derailing any person, let alone a creative individual with lots left to say and the imagined time left to say it. Doctors found a lump in his lung and wanted to send him for a biopsy, but the discovery fell around Christmas and most services were, at best, delayed or, at worst, unavailable. McCutcheon eventually learned the lump wasn’t cancerous, as doctors initially believed, but the abscessed strep infection he did have required rest, so he cancelled the first two months of his tour in 2016 and followed doctors’ orders.

Like any storyteller who requires words to make sense of experiences and then lets those experiences out into the world as songs, McCutcheon spun his experience into music. He certainly had the time do it. “It afforded me lots of time to do writing and thinking and appreciating the fact that I get to do this amazing job,” McCutcheon says of recovering from the infection. McCutcheon gave himself over to writing and the result inevitably formed his 38th album, Trolling for Dreams. The songs encompass stories large and small, detailing everything from the epiphany he had after discovering a Bible at a garage sale to dancing with his wife in the kitchen as supper cooked on the stove. But amid those tales exist an incredibly personal tune — “This Ain’t Me.” In the song, McCutcheon details his cancer scare, describing with scalpel-like precision the way it forced him to reexamine the connection between his mind and his body. “I know people get news like this every day. Still, I gotta say, this ain’t me,” he sings in the chorus, sharing how the lump at first seemed something apart from him and eventually a part of him. It resonated in visceral ways with listeners, who saw the universality in his subjective experience. Stories, after all, exude that power.

You channeled your cancer scare into the song, “This Ain’t Me.” Has it made you appreciate music even more? That it, in some ways, gave you the form and the feeling to work through something so difficult?

Well, it’s same thing I did when I was a kid. I was working through the world, and music was a big part of it and it continues to be. Now I get to write, which is a completely cathartic experience. I never intended “This Ain’t Me” be anything but a private meditation, but I run a couple of songwriting camps, and there are good local people who have come to the camps numerous times. They have a songwriting group and they invited me one day, so I went over and they asked, “What have you been writing?” I sang them that song, and I said, “But this is just a way to write through what you’re going through.” I was trying to be the teacher. They said, “No, no. This is so universal. Remember what you taught us at camp that sometimes the most personal is unwittingly the most universal?” More than a lot of songs in recent years, when I sing that one in public, people come up to me and say, “That’s my story.”

That’s the sentiment I gathered from it. It’s something so many people deal with, but I found your articulation of the experience so compelling: This reckoning that some foreign body is a part of you, and, more than that, is hurting you.

I was pretty raw in those days. It was Christmas season; it was impossible to get a biopsy scheduled. My wife — God bless her; I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her — she started hunting around branches of the hospital in little rural communities and that’s where we went. One of the things that may not seem quite as obvious, which is in the last verse of the song, is before they started the biopsy, they all prayed. It was the interesting juxtaposition of spirituality and science. I thought, “I’m so glad I’m in a place where there is that kind of submission to things you don’t know about,” because in some ways that’s what music is about.

All art is built on a foundation of discipline, but art is about abandon; it’s not about control. I’m doing a workshop these days called Holy Ground, which is the place where politics and spirituality meet, because that’s kind of where I came from as a kid. I think a lot of people dwell in that world, where you realize that you don’t know everything and there are things driving your life that you can’t put a finger on. To some, it’s Marxism or Ayn Rand or whatever; and to other people, it’s sort of how you grow up feeling that this is the right way to do things. And when you trace back its provenance, it probably goes back to you sitting in Sunday school or hearing your mother say something and it actually took.

It’s interesting that you say that people dwell within that space of politics and spirituality, because it strikes me how much those two concepts become almost antithetical, as you get older.

Well, I think we instinctively take big ideas to extremes, and things become really unnecessarily binary: You are liberal or conservative; you’re a Jew or Muslim. Everything is black and white.

Very either/or.

We love to think that the people in our group are deliciously diverse, are nuanced in every possible way, and the other is monolithic because we’re too lazy to get to know them. It’s one of the interesting things: The evolution of my thinking about political music. I grew up in a union movement and was really involved with the musician’s movement — still am — but I was a president of my local, which was formed to serve people in the traveling musicians world, so we got blues players, bluegrass bands, folk singers, gospel groups, and so on. I had to be involved in negotiating union contracts with presenters and festivals and stuff. I realized that I needed to know what the other side wanted, what was really important to them, so I knew what the parameters were. You’re just getting to know people. That’s the core of it. As we launch into this weird new world that seems to be so polarized, I’m not interested in playing into that anymore. I like political satire and I think humor proves that the emperor has no clothes, and here’s a guy who’s stark naked who would be really fun to write humorous, excoriating songs about, but that only plays into the disease that got us here.

That divisiveness.

Yes, we’re isolated and we’re insulated from each other. I know how to do that. I did that for a lot of years. Now, I think there’s a more creative way to move forward, and I’m interested in being part of that.

As someone who has taught songwriting, how do you keep from being too heavy-handed with a political message?

I have a number of credos that I adhere to and I teach. One of the most important is to remember that you just have the microphone, that doesn’t mean you have the answers. I remember the first time I stood up in front of a microphone, I thought, “Wow, this is an incredible privilege and, with that, comes responsibility.” Not many people get the microphone in this world, so how are you going to use it? [That development] was tempered by lots of things that happened in real life. I became a parent. What am I going to do to really parent them? Part of it is what I do with that microphone. The job of the artist is to ask interesting questions; just as important is “Don’t tell people what to do.” Give us a good idea.

How do you do that at a time when so many people seem to be shouting over one another to get their message across?

I think you can present ideas in all their messy glory. I’m interested in giving people new ideas — that’s what I’m searching for in the songs. In one respect, every song I write is a political song. You’re presenting your idea of what the world could be and, in some respects, you’re opening up the world to people. When I write songs based on my experience touring in Alaska, where I got to learn a lot about small commercial fisherman, that was opening up a world of the other to an audience that would otherwise have no experience in that.

It’s interesting that you say political, because I know the humanities continue to come under fire as being unnecessary, but I always viewed literature or music as being incredibly important because they taught empathy. And there’s a political aspect to understanding another person, another perspective.

Well, it was Kafka — and he talked about books, but substitute music, art, theatre — who said, “It is the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

I love that.

It’s beautiful. It does the best it can do, as far as creating compassion. Look, I’m a word nerd. My wife is a writer, and we have the entire 22-volume Oxford English Dictionary. I frequently go there and I look up words I feel I’ve overused or people tend to overuse, and one of the words was “compassion.” It is what every great religion, all the wisdom in literature, teaches us is a supreme virtue. I looked up “compassion,” which is really sharing in someone’s pain and, unless you are a participant, that is impossible. You’re not sharing directly in their pain. The closest you can come is empathy, and that’s one of the things that music is so powerfully able to do.

I write frequently in the first person, and I learned to do that from Woody Guthrie. “I’ll take you through a door and up a high stairs” … it’s so cinematic. Everybody in their own mind knows what that door looks like. If you ask four people, you’d get four different answers, but they were right there — they were invited in by the power of the first person and, all of a sudden, the magic can start. It was brilliant. I liberally steal from other good writers.

Well, that’s a creative trick. Or at least how you learn your craft at the beginning.

I don’t think you know that you’re doing it. I don’t think Woody would have taught a class in songwriting, saying, “Here’s how you do this.” He was just an instinctive genius, and had the ability to tell a story. And that’s what so many writers lack is the power of that connective tissue that is primal to human beings. We love stories. It’s what makes country music so popular into the 21st century. It’s the one kind of music that truly, consistently tells stories. It’s what makes Bruce Springsteen such a powerful songwriter. And it’s what drew me to folk music right away.

Is the power in the telling or is there more to it?

I’ve been a lifelong fan of the poet Pablo Neruda, and my friend took me to this place up the Pacific Coast in Chile six or seven years ago. I was walking through the courtyard and there was a boat there. The director of the Neruda Foundation said as we passed, “Oh, that’s a boat that Pablo built.” I stopped. I said, “Really? He was famously frightened of the sea.” He said, “Oh, he never put it into water and sailed it. He just built it. “ I said, “Well, then it’s not a boat.” He said, “Of course it’s a boat.” I said, “Until you put it in the water and it functions as a boat, it’s nothing more than sculpture.” And the same thing is true of the song. Until you take it out of the ivory tower of your imagination and turn it lose and let it be imbued with the meaning other people feel, then it’s just creative narcissism. I’m not an art-for-art’s-sake kind of guy. The song has to get out there; it has to do its work. And the people have to do their work on it.

Photo credit: Irene Young

A Million Woody Guthries (Op-ed)

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I’m a songwriter.

I was asked to write a piece about the 2016 election.

My first thought was, “What the hell will this have to do with being a songwriter?”

My second thought was about how easy it would be to write this piece about the people in my songs and show that they weren’t directly responsible for the election of Donald Trump.

I don’t have any mixed emotions about this election.

Donald Trump used a time-honored tradition utilized by bullies and scoundrels to shout down the truth and feed the racist, misogynist anger of his devoted followers.

I think he’s dangerous and I think that anybody who voted for him will be hurt just as badly as the people who did not. I also believe that the Republican party, unable to win a fair election in a demographically changed country, used every technique — legal and illegal — to steal the election.

The country is having a too-little-too-late conversation about exactly who voted for Trump, where they live, and how they think.

Some people have suggested to me that I write about the Trump voters because I write mostly about the white, formerly middle-class, American working-class.

My subjects usually are the people I know from my life as part of that group.

And it’s true: Some of them have been screwed.

And it’s true that they are so frustrated with PR-spouting politicians, local and national, that they might have seen a non-politician who never seemed to use a speech writer — let alone a public relations company — as their best hope.

Hopeless people are desperate.

Many of them voted for something new and different.

Something less Washington, D.C.

But, in doing so, they just voted for another one of the people who have been screwing them.

This is what happens when people get most of their information from liars and crooks, political charlatans, TV characters, bald-faced liars, and hate mongers who are as effective at turning their hearts as any faith-healing, religious, scam artist.

This is how a person thinks when they look at social media 20, 30, 1,000 times a day, at a site like Facebook, that pretends to a social greater good, yet behaves as if money is the only God and pits people against each other for advertising dollars.

Or at Twitter, where celebrity is everything and lies look just like the truth, only shorter and easier to digest.

I feel bad for many of them. The media on the coasts shames them and the voices that purport to be for them lie to them.

They could use defenders.

They could use a voice or two in support of their lives spent working for their families, exchanging long hours for a life of safety and love, a kind of life that has always been hard to come by if you don’t start somewhere near the top.

Living in the South or the middle of the country (condescendingly called the flyover states by the heads on the screens) isn’t enough of a reason to be ignored and insulted.

And because I’ve been them, I am them, and I owe them for my songs, it should be me.

I can’t do it.

But I’ve thought hard about what impact I would have defending the position of a single Trump voter, however misinformed or misguided.

My father is Jewish and my family started in the United States as immigrants from the Diaspora.

Now, we are in danger, again.

In a Trump society, our daughters and sons are in danger. The planet will die, for all intents and purposes, in their lifetimes.

In a Trump world, our wives will grow older in a society increasingly more misogynistic with drastically reduced health care options for everyone.

I may know where these Trump voters are coming from, but they are dead wrong to have given our country over to rich, white men.

I can forgive them and hope that they will become less hateful and more helpful.

But I can’t defend them.

So, what the hell does this have to do with being a songwriter?

If Trump’s behavior toward journalists is any indicator, there will be an attempt to silence all writers of conscience.

And that’s what the hell this has to do with songwriting.

Being a songwriter is a selfish profession.

Donald Trump will change that.

In a change that is already in progress, American journalism will die and be replaced by propaganda.

In a Trump society, as in the former Soviet Union, Apartheid South Africa, and current-day China, the writers and artists will become the only truth tellers.

Songwriters will have a mantle of artistic responsibility that has been largely missing for a very long time.

We will need to go back as far as the 1930s and Woody Guthrie.

There will need to be a million new Woody Guthries.

To succeed, this million-songwriter army will need to stop writing about their own feelings, their love affairs, their exhausted life on the road.

These new truth tellers must stop writing about working people like they were happy laborers, excited about the possibility of another day in the factory.

They will have to abandon their clichés about Southerners and people from the flyover states as simple, noble, unaware beasts.

There will be no place for art that ignores people who dream of simple, attainable, and quiet goals.

Some people’s dream is just a house like the house in the song “Little Boxes,” the insulting and inaccurate ’60s folk song dreams — used recently as the theme song of the popular show Weeds — that mocked anybody remotely interested in conforming to what was then considered middle-class values and dreams.

Songs like “Little Boxes” can never again be written.

The condescension of saying that somebody who isn’t chasing a bigger dream isn’t in pursuit of something valuable must cease.

No songs can be written that reduce a person’s value.

And it will be untruthful to write songs that straddle the divide, refusing to take any other stand than “We could all be cool to each other.”

People listen. Songs can make an impact, reminding us of why we strive to be human and humane.

Songs can, and do, bring people together.

But being a songwriter isn’t an act of courage.

The racist American right wing armed themselves while we songwriters were singing our songs.

Then, while we were singing some more songs, they took over our government.

Writing the truth is an act of courage.

And let’s prepare for whatever comes next.

Let’s hope that we need arm ourselves only with the truth.

— Nathan Bell, December 22, 2016

Photo credit: AK Rockefeller via Foter.com / CC BY-SA

WATCH: Cashavelly Morrison, ‘Iodine’

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Artist: Cashavelly Morrison
Hometown: Winston-Salem, NC
Song: “Iodine”
Album: Kingdom Belongs to a Child

In Their Words: “I wrote the song ‘Iodine’ after Michael Brown was shot. Sitting at home with my own son, safely witnessing these events from afar, I felt that remaining silent made me complicit in his death. Holding my son tightly, while thinking of the loss his mother was experiencing, felt like an injustice in itself. I wrote the song to honor the strength of all mothers who lose their children to violence.

For the music video, we asked dancer Dominica Greene to represent the deconstruction of the day-to-day motions for a mother who has lost a child. Filmmaker S. Cagney Gentry wanted to reflect her going through these rituals she had with her son, and the grief and loneliness left in his place. We all saw this as something to unify us. No matter the circumstances of who is to blame, who did wrong, or the politics we play into it, there is a mother who, for the rest of her life, must bear what her son might have been, day after day.” — Cashavelly Morrison

Gretchen Peters’ Protest Song (Op-ed)

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As a songwriter, I'm genetically programmed to dig for truth. To recognize it when it appears, to root it out, to know the difference between words that sound nice together and ones that hurt, that pierce, that open wounds in order to clean them out. Ones that bear witness.

Some of us have got it made / some of us have more than paid / but we're all marching in this slow parade of losses.

I wrote those lines three years ago. The parade of losses stepped it up a few notches last week: Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, the country I thought I lived in.

Last Tuesday, I went to bed in a country where hate groups like the KKK were universally reviled, considered fringe lunatics. On Wednesday, I woke up in a strange land, where they were holding a victory march for their new president-elect and a white supremacist was poised to take on a top job in his cabinet. I went to bed in a world where a woman becoming president was more than a theoretical possibility; it looked like it was finally going to happen. I woke up to find the glass ceiling still intact, and my heart was the thing that had shattered.

If I have grandchildren, I will be hard-pressed to find a way to make them understand what a painful shock this was. The grief that I felt for a homeland which, apparently, only existed in my mind.

I heard from friends: "Your song is your weapon." "We need art and artists more now than ever." All true. But before I can begin, I have to find out what I need.

Right now what I need feels like a safe place to hide, in a bunker with my family and my friends and especially everyone I love who is so much more at risk than I am — starting with my transgender son. I wondered how many mothers across the country received a panicky, frantic text message on Wednesday morning like the one I found on my phone. When your own child fears for his safety because he is suddenly no longer welcome in his own country, what do you say? "You’re overreacting?" He’s not. "It's going to be okay?" Maybe it won’t. At best, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

Sometimes the songs know more than you do. They are prescient in a way that is uncanny and inexplicable, except that human history repeats itself, in heartbreakingly familiar ways, and, as Christopher Booker said, "We write the same seven stories over and over."

Sometimes the songs transform with the times. My friend Mary Gauthier emailed me Wednesday: “The meaning of my fucking songs has changed.” I found myself singing my song “Idlewild” on Saturday night and hearing the words come out of my mouth as if they were brand new. I wrote it about my childhood in New York in the 1960s.

We shoot our rockets / we shoot our presidents / we shoot the commies and the niggers and the Viet Cong / Everything changes / everything stays the same.

As the sickeningly regular parade of Black men and boys murdered in the street continued, the song took on more layers, and felt more important to sing. Now it feels like we’ve stepped into some kind of nonlinear time machine and it’s 1968 and 1939 and 1861, all at once. And I sing it and I can’t believe we’re here again.

As a writer and the daughter of a journalist, the loss I mourn the most is the loss of truth. Now it seems that words don’t matter except to the extent that they can deliver the poison into the minds of the unsuspecting. Facts and truth are negotiable, malleable, unnecessary. Believe and repeat fake news on Facebook. Call a sexually abused woman a liar and she is one. I was raised to make my case, if I believed in something. I was taught that science and logic and facts were things to be celebrated and respected. That we evolve and progress by the exchange of ideas, and presenting one's case with care and empathy and above all, facts, is paramount. After Tuesday, all evidence points to the fact that the Orwellian nightmare is real, it is here, and it is now.

Although it feels futile — and I feel impotent to change things — one day I’ll write a song, and then another, and then another. But not yet. First, I have to comfort my son, my family, my friends, and, hardest of all, myself. That will be my first protest song.

Singer/songwriter Gretchen Peters is a member of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame with three decades' worth of award-winning tunes in her catalog. 

Photo credit: yukon28209 via Foter.com / CC BY-SA.

Are We on the Verge of a Golden Age of Protest Music? (Op-ed)

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A few weeks ago, I finished the final draft of an editorial about the modern state of protest music. The Bluegrass Situation had asked me to write on this topic because I had just released an album called How to Dream Again — a largely political album in which I attempt to examine the current state of America by asking questions about the American Dream, the failures of our economic and political systems, the ongoing issue of racism in this country, and whether there's any hope for potential solutions. The tone of the piece I wrote was measured, and largely optimistic.

Then, Donald Trump was elected president.

In my original piece, I wrote that we're living in the most turbulent time in America since the 1960s. That now seems like an understatement. We’re now living in the most turbulent time in the world since the 1930s.

Everywhere you look, people are uncertain about the future and angry about problems that seem to have no immediate solutions. On an almost weekly basis, another Black or brown person is killed by a police officer. The middle and working classes have been eroding for decades, there aren’t enough jobs for those who need them, and many of the jobs that exist are unstable and low-paying. Our governmental institutions have ground to a halt due to partisanship and public distrust. An opiate epidemic is ravaging Middle America. Scientists say that the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will cause temperatures and sea levels to rise dramatically in the coming decades.

Half of the country — at least, half of those who actually voted — responded to this pervasive uncertainty and anger by voting for Donald Trump — a con man, a liar, and a racist. His lack of knowledge and preparation alone should have been disqualifying. His election has already sparked racial violence and protests across the country. He has promised to deport millions of people and ban Muslim immigration to the country. His aggressive rhetoric and unpredictable temperament threaten to spark international conflict. He has already named a climate change denier to staff the EPA and a known KKK sympathizer to lead his administration.

The frustration and change of the past several years has given us glimpses of a coming golden age of protest music. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly may come to define the Black Lives Matter movement in the same way Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan defined the Civil Rights Movement. With their new album, American Band, Drive-By Truckers haven’t only put out their best work in a decade, they've crystallized our current political moment. Still, these examples are largely viewed as one-offs rather than part of a larger trend.

In light of the election of Donald Trump, this can’t remain the case. In my original piece, I encouraged songwriters who “feel called to write protest songs” to step up and do so. Now, that rhetoric feels too soft. Now, we have a responsibility to do so. I’m not saying that every song you write should be a political screed. But we must use our voices to inform people, rally people together, and help mobilize a movement that will resist the dangerous forces that Trump threatens to unleash in the next few years.

This can be a scary step to take. I know from experience. Two years ago, after putting out two albums in quick succession, I felt like I’d run out of things to say as a songwriter. At the same time, I was growing increasingly frustrated with the political landscape. After reading AIynda Segarra’s May 2015 Bluegrass Situation piece, in which she called on folk musicians to — in the words of Bell Hooks — “fall in love with justice” and use our music to discuss issues of social justice and human rights, I decided I wanted to write songs with greater political relevance. Almost immediately, though, I got scared. I was scared of rubbing some people the wrong way. I was worried about the effects this direction might have on my career. Mostly, I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to write good songs in this new style. But I kept repeating the mantra I’d adopted when I first made the terrifying leap into my music career: Lean into your fear.

So I got to work. And two years later, my earlier fears have evaporated. I filled my brain with ideas related to politics, history, economics, and race — studying writers like Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Thomas Piketty — and wrote, rejected, and edited dozens of new songs. Along the way, I learned to write songs that effectively blend the personal and the political. And as I’ve spent the past year traveling around the country playing the songs that ended up on How to Dream Again, I haven’t encountered any heckles or boos. In fact, I’ve been humbled and surprised by the positive reaction to my political material. Over and over, I’ve heard people express how much they're craving honest, thoughtful voices that can help them frame and understand what’s happening in the country and the world.

After all, we live in a time when it seems like there are no trustworthy leaders, institutions, or public figures left. Church attendance is at an all-time-low. Distrust of government is just about about the only thing liberals and conservatives can agree on. Time and again in 2016, the media has proven its inability to understand the changes happening in the country. Hell, even Bill Cosby — the one-time epitome of a wise, honest father figure to many of my generation — turned out to be a monster. And as we’ve learned in the past year, where courageous, trustworthy truth-tellers fail to emerge, demagogues thrive. 

All of us humans have a deep need to understand the world we inhabit. We need to be reminded of universal truths. There will always be a need for songs about love, pain, and heartbreak. But we also need to be confronted with temporal, day-to-day truths specific to a particular place and time. These kinds of truths are what folk music was created to communicate, long before the Internet and cable news. As Woody Guthrie put it, “A folk song is what's wrong and how to fix it, or it could be who's hungry and where their mouth is, or who's out of work and where the job is, or who's broke and where the money is, or who's carrying a gun and where the peace is.”

This type of information can be life-changing. If it reaches enough people, it can alter the course of history. If more modern-day Woody Guthries had emerged over the past year, maybe Trump’s message wouldn’t have resonated the way that it has. This is the deep power of folk music. Perhaps the next golden age of protest music has yet to arrive because we, the next generation of songwriters, have yet to fully realize this power.

It’s understandable. As songwriters and musicians, we're reminded of our weaknesses on a daily basis. No one buys records anymore. Fewer people are going to shows. Streaming pays fractions of a cent per play. I don’t need to remind you: Your bank statements and half-empty clubs are daily reminders, as are mine.

I think many of us secretly believe that our songs don’t matter. We were born with the gift — and curse — of needing to make music so badly that we can’t do anything else. But we were also unlucky enough to be born in exactly the wrong time, a time when songs have become practically worthless. It can often feel like no one is listening to these songs that we’ve devoted our lives to creating.

But people are listening. I take the subway to my part-time job twice a week when I’m not on tour, and nearly every passenger in every car is wearing headphones. At the gym, nearly everyone is wearing headphones. On the sidewalk, nearly everyone is wearing headphones. Sure, songwriters and musicians are making less money, but everyone is still listening to music. Every day. And we’re listening to more music than ever.

If you’re a songwriter, or an artist of any kind, now is not the time for apathy, complacency, solipsism, or silence. You have a mouthpiece, even if it’s relatively small, and we all need you to use it. Be brave. If, as Woody Guthrie once said, all human beings are really just hoping machines, then it's our job to provide the fuel.

So protest and encourage solidarity through your art. It’s not as scary or as hard as you think. God knows there’s plenty of material out there, and audiences are hungry for these kinds of songs. Our country and world desperately need them, now more than ever. If enough of us listen to our intuition, lean into our fears, and dig deeply to find new kernels of truth, we just might discover a power we didn’t know we had — the power to inspire thought and change, to bring people together around a common cause, and to drastically change the political conversation in our country and around the world.

We could make more than songs. We could make more than a living. We could make history.

Max Porter is a singer/songwriter who performs as M. Lockwood Porter. His newest album, How to Dream Again, came out this September on Black Mesa Records (US) and Hidden Trail Records (UK/EU).

David Crosby: On Opening the Doors to the Muse

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Throughout most of his time in the music industry, David Crosby’s name has usually been followed by at least two others, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, and occasionally a third, Neil Young. Though the majority of his work has been with groups — be it CSN, CSNY, or even the Byrds — Crosby has ventured into solo territory on more than a few occasions. While his last solo effort, Croz (2014), had a full band backing the prolific songwriter, he returned in October with something markedly different, something that highlights what he’s capable of creating when all production falls away and it’s just a man and a microphone.

Crosby’s new Lighthouse harkens back to his first solo album, If Only I Could Remember My Name (1971), which is exactly what producer and collaborator Michael League (of GRAMMY Award-winning pop/jazz ensemble Snarky Puppy fame) thought they could achieve with this latest project. Recounting first approaching League, Crosby says with a calm, centered voice that becomes gravelly now and then, “I thought I would ask him to produce the record, and it would be like hiring a master craftsmen with a gigantic toolbox, namely his band, which are an unbelievable bunch of players.” But League had another idea. “I said that to him, and he said, ‘Well, no, actually. I really loved your first solo album, and the direction I’d really love to go is acoustic guitar and bass and vocals. I think we can make that kind of record.’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s right in my wheelhouse. I would love to do that. That sounds terrific.’”

It’s funny how life always has other plans in mind. John Lennon, perhaps, said it best in that regard.

Whereas If Only I Could Remember My Name exhibits a folk sound distinctly pinned to its time period — with bright guitar, meandering rhythms, and introspective lyrics engaged with the political activity of the 1970s — Lighthouse has a much different feel, even while it borrows from its predecessor. It’s as sparse as it is meditative. Built largely around Crosby’s voice and guitar, the instrumentation doesn’t get fluffy and the arrangements remain stripped down to the essentials. If a song need be loud in order to be visceral, Lighthouse instead proves the opposite to be true. Even though they are arguably quieter because of the soft melodic phrasing he builds around his contemplative thoughts, Crosby’s songwriting still resonates physically. Listening to them, one can’t help but feel a pang in the chest or a pull at the heartstrings, to borrow a worn phrase, even though that kind of reaction tends to follow from louder or more thickly arranged music.

Then there’s Crosby’s reflective songwriting — the ace he’s always held no matter for whom he’s writing — which oscillates between his family-first mindset to current events like the Syrian refugee crisis. The album begins with a love song directed toward Crosby’s wife Jan, “Things We Do For Love.” It’s a sentimental reflection about how deeply Crosby feels for her. Of course, having written about love in many different ways over the years, it’s naturally shifted with each passing album. How exactly? “There was at least one snotty egotistical answer there, but maybe I should try,” he chuckles, trying to answer the question seriously when his inclination is to be lighthearted. “I’ve gotten better at it, that’s what I was going to make a joke out of,” he continues. “It started out, when I wrote about love, I was writing about romantic love. And now, when I write about love, it’s family. Family gets to be really big for you later on in life. It really gets to be wonderful.” But he doesn’t draw a sharp line in the sand between romantic and familial love. “That particular song is romantic love, too,” Crosby adds, “because it’s to my wife and I feel very romantic about my wife.” So romantic, in fact, that his wedding ring served as the song’s primary percussive instrument, and took on a greater symbolic role as a result.

For a man who has experienced his share of personal and professional drama, ranging from health issues to a contentious public falling out with Graham Nash, Crosby understands family’s importance more than ever. “My wife and I have been together 40 years, and that’s an amazing thing in our world. Two of my ex-partners got into huge divorces last year in their 70s for Christ's sake, and I’m so glad I’m not driven to do that kind of thing,” he says, avoiding naming names and moving right back into his own matrimonial bliss. “It’s a joy, and it’s the only thing that’s as important as my music: my family.”

Besides singing about his personal life and the moments of joy he’s discovered there of late, Crosby’s political nature again arises on Lighthouse. He once said songwriters have a responsibility to play the part of town criers, those willing to call attention to something untoward going on in the greater social fabric. But getting people to pay attention when there’s so very much to pay attention to remains the larger question. “It’s very tough,” he admits. “Here’s the thing: You do feel the urge to do that town crier part of the job, but you can’t have that be all you do because your job is — even more than that — to make people boogie, and to make people feel stuff: Make ‘em wanna dance, make ‘em feel emotions, make ‘em feel the blues, make ‘em feel love, make ‘em feel triumph. And then, every once in a while, you can say, ‘Oh by the way, it’s 11:30 and all’s well, ‘ or ‘Oh by the way, it’s 11:30 and you’re electing that son of a bitch to be president?’ But if you do it all the time, then you turn yourself into a preacher, and nobody listens to preachers.”

Crosby doesn’t get preachy on Lighthouse, but the social activist does include two tracks focusing on contemporary affairs. “Somebody Other Than You” chastises politicians sending people off to war while protecting their own children, while “Look in Their Eyes” focuses on the Syrian refugee crisis. For a man as outspoken as Crosby has been on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, it seems like a missed opportunity to avoid taking aim, even obliquely, at a man exposing the racist underbelly still rampant in the U.S. It’s something he doesn’t remain silent about for long. “I’m surprised and very disturbed by it,” Crosby says of Trump’s popularity, not mincing his words about those who support him. “It’s an aberration, but it reveals how many people there are who are really almost illiterate or essentially quite stupid. Or they would not buy this guy. This guy can’t even control his face, let along his mouth. You can read everything he thinks right on his face. It’s very disturbing that there is that much ignorance and that much stupidity out there, that they can have a party of a whole candidate’s worth of people who don’t get it. It’s kind of shocking.”

Perhaps some kind of song about Trump will make it into his next album, which he’s working on with his son, James Raymond. “James and I are just about to finish it. It’s called Home Free, and we have it just about down.” That project will follow closely in Croz’s footsteps and include a full backing band.

At 75 years old and with over 50 years in the music industry, songwriting still brings the brightest color to Crosby’s world. “I don’t know how I got to here,” he admits, when discussing how the muse continues to choose him after all this time. He likens the moment to leaving all the doors and windows in a house open to catch a breeze. By remaining open to creativity, Crosby finds it continues to stop by for a chat, and he’s more than ready to listen. “I know that the music comes to me, and that it is a joyous process for me to make songs. I just love writing songs,” he says. “These are very visceral forces to me. I don’t really understand how come they’re so strong, but they’re there and I have to pay attention to them because it’s a gift I’ve been given and I don’t want to not use it.”

 

For another side of the coin, read Amanda's Artist of the Month feature on Graham Nash.

Lede illustration by Cat Ferraz.

LISTEN: Waiting for Henry, ‘Town Called Patience’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Waiting for Henry
Hometown: New York, NY
Song: "Town Called Patience"
Album: Town Called Patience
Release Date: August 26
Label: Mighty Hudson Music

In Their Words: "'Town Called Patience' is our big protest song about not forgetting the small things … like listening to each other. I feel like we’ve got ourselves bound into such an incredibly powerful 'me' culture, that we end up creating all this traffic of insanely high expectations for everything and everyone. Then we get stuck in that traffic. Then we miss all the exits. Can’t miss those exits." — David Slomin

Photo credit: Mitch Easter

LISTEN: JD & the Straight Shot, ‘Under That Hood’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: JD & the Straight Shot
Hometown: New York, NY
Song: “Under That Hood"
Album: Ballyhoo!
Release Date: January 15
Label: Proper Music Distribution

In Their Words: "'Under That Hood' is like many of our other tunes in that it tells a story. In this case, it is more literal than most of our songs. It tries to tell the Trayvon Martin story from both sides. In the end, it comments on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. We tried to match the melody, chord progression, and vocal harmonies to the somber mood of the story. It is meant to be disturbing because the story is disturbing." — Jim Dolan

Photo credit: Kristin Barlowe