Song For Today

I'm at a loss for words.  There will be a demo in Portland tonight (Peninsula Park at 8 pm), and more across the country, I assume.  This track is a track called "Say Their Names" from my upcoming album, Rebel Songs.  It's the song I wrote just after Jacob Blake was shot.  This version is a rough mix with drums and bass.

Today a judge in London decided against extraditing the Wikileaks founder to the US, where he would face a potential 175-year prison sentence.  Julian Assange is a journalist who has done more in the service of humanity than perhaps anyone you'll ever meet.  This song, "Behind These Prison Walls," is a rough mix version from the first few recording sessions of what will ultimately be my next album, to be titled Rebel Songs.

The US is a nation with amnesia, with a population generally ill-equipped to do any independent thinking as a result.  And if you think this problem only exists among the Proud Boys, then you are also a victim of misinformation -- just from a different source.

In the past 2 days, 2 trains in the state of Washington have had accidents.  One of them involved train cars full of crude oil, that then burned.  Is another Lac Megantic, 2013 here in the Pacific Northwest virtually inevitable, as things are going?  Yes.

Christmas in Bethlehem this year is extremely difficult for yet new reasons, on top of the usual brutal military occupation.

I have, over the years, written nearly an album's worth of Christmas songs, but the one about Pirate Santa is my favorite. Very 2020, I'd say. 

When I learned in the course of an interview with Abigail Disney that actors and other Disney employees are paid so badly that some of them are living in their cars, I had some musical commentary to contribute to this stark vision.

A budget is, as is often said, a moral document.  This may be more true than ever, with regards to whatever new stimulus package the Congress may or may not pass this month.

British troops slaughtered gold miners in Australia who were refusing to pay taxes they couldn't afford to pay anyway.  29 people died in the massacre.  The miners continued their resistance afterwards, and thus terrified the authorities into giving in to all of their demands.

I have just had what has now become a familiar experience to many:  after seven months of busy signals and inexplicable rejections, a windfall arrived, in the form of one check for each of the 29 weeks that have gone by since I first applied, which was when applying at all became a possibility for gig workers in Oregon like me.  Which was a month after all of my tours were canceled, and all the venues and all the borders were closed.

At this time in November, 2003, downtown Miami, Florida was drenched in tear gas, as the Free Trade Area of the Americas talks went on there, along with the protests.

On November 19th, 1915, IWW organizer, cartoonist, songwriter and popular educator from Gävle, Sweden, Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, better known as Joe Hill, was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah.  His state murder was only one of many official and unofficial lynchings of union organizers across the US during the period.

To put it simply, the way things are in the modern Big Tech-dominated economy, crowdfunded patronage is the only way for someone like me to survive as an artist today.  In 2020 that's much more true.  So, to everyone in the world who appreciates artists:  thank you for your support.  You make my art/life possible (just).  If you want to make it a bit more possible: patreon.com/davidrovics

Every day I read another story of someone whose last words were "I wish I had believed the virus was real."  This song could be from the vantage point of any number of them, sadly.

Just how top-heavy can an icon be before it can't stand up at all?

It's November 2020, it's been quite a yearI can't imagine where we'll be once December is here

The new vaccine Pfizer is talking about may or may not be the one, but the news had at least a slightly therapeutic impact on the state of my imagination.

Chuck Rosina was going through his old cassette tape recordings of his radio shows from the 1990's, and he came across this little gem.  It's a clip of a visit to the radio studio in the basement at MIT, where WMBR is located.  Rich Caloggero is accompanying me on guitar.  The song is clearly very Jim Page influenced (as are lots of my songs), and very dated.  The atmosphere around the conversation that evening in the fall of 1999 really seems to capture the optimistic feeling within the very active global justice movement of the day, long before 911 substantively changed that.

FRENCH SPEAKERS:  Joviale with Radio Zinzine in France did a two-part special on the history of 2020, annotated by my songs on the subject.  (The songs are in English, everything else is in French.)

Whatever happens with this election or anything else, it's pretty clear that a lot of people will be spending a lot of time in some form of quarantine this winter, and many more people will make efforts at playing concerts on the internet.   Here are some helpful tips, in the form of a song.

Today would have been Kevin Zeese's 65th birthday.  Soon after he died last month, his partner and co-conspirator, Margaret Flowers, wrote about the last speech that Kevin gave, shortly before he died.  I made it rhyme.  Rest in peace, dear Kevin Zeese.

Just a love song for the moon, and the very recent discovery of water upon it.

In the midst of what they called the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy administration was prepared to sacrifice humanity.  The only thing that stopped this plan were the actions of one Russian submarine commander.  Against the wishes of his national leadership, and the other two commanders on the sub, he refused to retaliate against the US warship that was attacking his nuclear-armed sub, deciding instead to surrender.

If anything can be gleaned from the overall state of my YouTube comments in combination with the state of your average front yard in the USA today, it's very clear that this country is an extremely divided place, in so many ways.

For those of us who are not glued to Fox News or otherwise stuck with their heads firmly entrenched in the sand, and regardless of what anyone thinks of any of the factions of the Democratic Party or of our corrupt system of bourgeois democracy, here is a statement of the obvious:  the Republican leadership is openly organizing a coup d'etat.  They've been working on it for a long time, and they're stepping up their game in the last weeks before the election.

I'm not sure how useful empathy is, whether expressed musically or otherwise, if it cannot be eaten, if it does not provide a warm, dry bed, if the oxygen provided is only metaphorical.

As things get increasingly bleak here in the USA, with the government paralyzed, the pandemic out of control, and winter approaching, I find myself dreaming of other lands where things function better.

Danish civil society mobilized for several days at the beginning of October, 1943, and successfully transported the vast majority of Denmark's Jewish population across the water to Sweden, where they were given asylum, where they survived the rest of World War 2.

September 27th, 1850 is the date that the Donation Land Claim Act passed by the US Congress went into effect.  This explicitly racist law played a massive role in creating the Oregon of today.

The president and the attorney general and a whole lot of corporate media says Portland, Seattle and New York City are "anarchist jurisdictions."  It's a technical term, apparently.  We anarchists say, if only it were true.

Excerpt from Donald Trump speaking on September 17th at his White House conference on American History:  "The left-wing rioting and mayhem are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long. Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history."

Greetings from Portland, which has the most toxic air of any major city on Earth today.  And other cities in Oregon have suffered far worse than bad air in the past few days.

On September 11th, 1973, Chilean democracy was overthrown in a US-backed military coup, leading to decades of state terror and an exodus of Chilean refugees.

After the far right continually come to downtown Portland and attack people while the police do nothing, someone was bound to be killed, and someone was.  And then, as if in retribution, police executed Michael Reinoehl in a hail of bullets, with no body cams on, outside of Lacey, Washington.

I got an email yesterday from someone in the Hague named Ben Fraters, who described in prose and in rhyme what he had just witnessed.  A few emails back and forth as we both rewrote verses and added new ones, and, voila.

On September 3rd, 1991, one of the worst industrial accidents in US history took place in Hamlet, North Carolina, at a chicken processing plant that had never been inspected by any regulatory authorities, after 11 years of operation.  25 workers died, mostly Black women.

The mayor in Portland, Oregon is also the police commissioner.  His police are completely out of control, and have been since long before he took office.  In any case, he has failed to change the situation, when it needed changing most.  "Resign" is a call that gets louder every day around here.

On September 2nd, 2015, the limp body of refugee toddler, Aylan Kurdi, was found on a beach in Turkey.

On August 29th, 1921, ten thousand armed men were on one side of a valley, defending a prison, and over ten thousand union miners were besieging the town with the aim of freeing the prisoners.  West Virginia, during the Coal Mine Wars.

At this time in 2005, a hurricane was bearing down on the Gulf coast that would overwhelm the crumbling levees of the city of New Orleans.  A government response that vacillated between racist fear-mongering and criminal incompetence followed, as did a lot of mutual aid.

#Kenosha

A song about a few of those murdered by criminal police, with a very simple chorus.  Note to anyone performing the song anywhere:  there is intentionally room in the chorus to say a name in between every time you sing "say their names."  The last chorus can go on for a very, very long time.

On August 24th, 1814, in the course of the war that later became known as The War of 1812 (sic), the British Navy landed in Washington, DC.  Retaliating against the US Army's complete destruction of the Canadian city of York (later called Toronto), troops led by General Robert Ross set fire to a number of prominent US government buildings.  It was a great day for the construction industry.

Like so many cities, Portland has a huge class divide, and it's getting worse.  Most of the people with the most money live on the west side of the city.  Across the Willamette River to the east, the further east you go, the rattier it gets, the more chronic the poverty, the lower the life expectancy.

Years after the Valdez disaster and the herring population hadn't recovered.  Fishing communities were devastated, along with the environment.  The community of Cordova, Alaska took action.

Otherwise known as dismantling the postal service during a pandemic.  And so much more!

I've long thought it was convenient and appropriate that the English word "loot" and the Portuguese word for "struggle" sound very similar.  The powers-that-be are looting the people and the planet in so many ways every day of the year, but on rare occasions when some people dare loot back a little, like in Chicago a couple nights ago, it's time to call in the National Guard.

On August 12th, 2018, a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer.  There have been many similar incidents since then, across the United States.

On August 6th, 1945, the US became the first and only nation ever to use a nuclear weapon against a civilian population.  The genocidal bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no military value, and were done entirely for propaganda purposes.

One of the places Trump has recently deployed extra special federal agents is on the Mexican border, where No More Deaths is active. I wrote a song about them, and the latest political trial against the activists, resulting in the latest acquittal.  (The song is the title track of my 2019 album, Strangers & Friends.)

As a touring musician with connections in many different countries, I always thought I had a sort of job security.  I also never thought I'd retire, either voluntarily or otherwise.