2010
The Turning
A reflective song about sensing change before anyone can name it. It asks whether history is turning, whether a reckoning is coming, and whether we are capable of recognizing it while still inside it.
Found On These Albums
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Songs Tagged: political
29 songs
April 10, 2021
Whisky and Ashes
A folk song, about lying on a couch and being unable to care, while the world outside has gone sideways. The last verse reaches for help with "this message bottle" and "a rescuer who needs a lot of rope.".
Rough Working Demo
September 22, 2018
Time
A dark political song about the collapse of norms and the narrowing of public life. Its urgency is sharpened by how little it needs to say.
January 11, 2024
Predator
A song about a specific type of political figure — hand grenade, dark-side clown, machine that consumes. The chord sequence borrows from Blaze Foley's "Oval Room," and the acknowledgment is in the notes. The...
Rough Working Demo
Video
2016
Creature Discomfort
A darkly comic song about media saturation, public cruelty, and the warped creature that collective fear can summon. The tone is satirical, but the unease underneath it is real.
Rough Working Demo
2014
Palestine
A political song of grief and witness, refusing the idea that any faith can own a piece of earth by right. Its refrain is simple and direct because the sorrow it names already says enough.
Found On This Album
2013
Ninety-Nine
A political song about collective resistance, built from paired opposites and crowd-sized images. Its refrain is plain and insistent: we can take it back.
Found On This Album
2016
Dear Comrade
A political song addressed to working people and the ways they are taught to misread their own hardship. Its argument is blunt because the stakes are.
Rough Working Demo
Video
2015
Absolution
A political and environmental reckoning that wonders whether absolution is even available anymore. Its repeated phrases give the song the sound of bad news already settling in.
Rough Working Demo
January 27, 2024
Old White Dudes
A folk song that attempts to hold two perspectives on aging white men — their own dread, and the structural-power analysis — in the same frame without resolving them. The last verse finds the real problem in...
Rough Working Demo
May 19, 2019
This is How it Goes
A political song built as a rolling catalog of public types, false prophets, and ordinary people trying to get by while things decay around them. The refrain carries a tired fatalism, but the song itself still...
2012
Stop the Train
A warning song about runaway systems, where profit and speed have long since outrun wisdom. The image of the train is simple and effective: once the machinery is in motion, the question is whether anyone can...
2010
Stranger
A song of estrangement, sung from the point where alienation from friends, country, and public life starts to feel permanent. Even so, it keeps reaching toward a different destination, ending not in defeat but...
2016
The Man is Back in Town
A plainspoken political song, with a gallery of characters each responding differently to a new authoritarian presence. Jethro Bodine, Jihadi Jack, Martha Sue, the corner guy — each verse inhabits a type...
Rough Working Demo
2013
Not. Stopped. Again.
A blues-rock declaration of recovery after being held back by a person or circumstance. It looks backward just long enough to measure the distance already traveled.
Found On This Album
January 1, 2025
New Years Day, 2025
A New Year's Day reckoning that catalogs crisis after crisis without softening any of it. The repeated questions at the center are as plain as they are hard to answer.
Rough Working Demo
July 2, 2023
Vivid Blue
A reflective song about watching the political moment from a porch, with a hummingbird and a pipe for company. The verses describe normalcy giving way to something harder to name, and the refrain arrives at...
1980
Too Late
An early apocalyptic lament that faces loss without softening it. The song piles up its reckonings one after another, but beneath the severity a human voice insists that what has happened must be named.
2011
Hey Jesus, What the Fuck?
A blunt protest song aimed at violence done in the name of faith. Its anger is public rather than private, turning outrage into a rough, unvarnished chorus that refuses consolation.
March 25, 2026
Evil is Out Walking
A song built on the traditional doubled-line verse structure. The verses accumulate: evil is talking, scheming, grasping, using a whippin' boy, fooling frightened minds. The refrain names the target without...
Rough Working Demo
Video
March 25, 2026
The Blues Have Got Me
A song about succumbing to sorrow even while trying to name it, joke with it, and sing through it. The title tells the truth up front and lets the verses live inside it.
Rough Working Demo
February 25, 2026
Ballad for the ICE Man
A folk-blues structured as a community's collective voice speaking directly to immigration enforcement. The verses escalate from neighborhood to schools, from refusal to warning. The final line repeats slowly,...
Rough Working Demo
September 30, 2025
Headin' North
A blues with a jam structure that opens up in performance. The lyric is about leaving a place that can no longer be saved — a town, a country, a moment — with the anger of someone who saw it coming and...
Rough Working Demo
May 18, 2025
A Thin Veneer
A folk song, about watching someone reveal themselves as something they didn't appear to be. The verses track from initial perception to current behavior to the question of how it will be viewed by history....
Rough Working Demo
Video
May 3, 2025
Winter of Hate
A folk song, about the Boomer generation's transformation from Aquarian idealism to fearful authoritarianism. The verses describe the movement — tired of the establishment, now become the establishment,...
March 25, 2025
Can of Worms
A satirical folk song that turns its attention to public figures and the stories that gather around them. It lets the details speak for themselves, allowing the tone to shift between humor and unease without...
Rough Working Demo
Video
March 9, 2025
Liberty
A political song spoken in the voice of Liberty herself, protesting the way her image has been turned against the people she was meant to welcome. Its anger is sharpened by grief for the promise being betrayed.
