Here’s a challenge to all Americana artists: Start recording and releasing sociopolitical songs NOW (if you haven’t already). Write new songs if you’re good at that, but if not, there’s plenty out there that could always use a wider airing. As Margo Price recently told Salon of Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” which is featured on her new album: “I wish everybody would cover it, because it needs to be sung and we cannot look away from what is happening right now. We cannot act like this is normal.”
There’s more about Price’s Days of Unrest below, plus a look at new records from Australian outfit Luluc, Minneapolis singer-songwriter Mason Jennings, and Austin duo Deer Fellow. We close with a personal rumination on the late, great North Carolina singer Lynn Blakey, the subject of a career retrospective assembled by renowned producer Chris Stamey.
Margo Price — Days Of Unrest
The Fourth of July found Margo Price in her usual element at Willie Nelson’s Picnic, but this year she brought along a fresh set of songs to fit the occasion. As its title suggests, Days of Unrest is a protest album, though a quirky one. Three of its nine songs are instrumentals (“San Marcos,” “San Marcos Theme” and “San Marcos El Fin”) that serve as mortar holding together the bricks of five pointedly chosen covers plus one revisited original, “Can’t Stand Still” from a 2011 album by Price’s former band Buffalo Clover.
