Tag: Donald Trump

Matthew Ryan Finds Beauty Within Our National Affliction: “On Our Death Day”

Matthew Ryan On Our Death Day

Matthew Ryan has released a new single, “On Our Death Day.” The song, in the form of a “maxi-single,” arrives now without an album because Ryan felt an urgency to release it. It’s a song about our national moment, timely yet timeless, trying to find some sanity and hope in spite of what is coming out of Washington.

In October 2016, Ryan put music to the pre-election mood with his instrumental album, Current Events. Part of the purpose of that album was to create a soundtrack for information overload and the troubles of the times. With these new singles, he wrestles with the the post-election situation through his lyrics.

On Our Death Day

Although “On Our Death Day” comes out of our current political moment, the song is not political in the sense of a call to arms or of being in the voice of an activist. Instead, the singer asks timeless questions. The voice comes from someone troubled by our world. And the person could be someone who voted for our current president, or not.

The singer asks these questions of someone named Mary. The context leads one to imagine the conversation taking place between a man and his beloved. Perhaps they are an older couple in Ryan’s home state of Pennsylvania. Maybe they are farmers in the Midwest, or they could be anywhere in the country. (Or one could find the singer’s appeal going to a more spiritual place in light of the woman’s name.)

There are no accusations here, and Ryan has called “On Our Death Day” a love song. The opening verse ponders how we got to this moment in our lives. The singer understands the unhappiness that brought the current occupant to the White House. When those in the city and in the country are hurting, they look for answers: “You’ll start looking where you hurt.”

There is understanding, not blame, for those who opened the door. But it is clear who is the target of the second verse.

There’s a vulture with his head down,

The captain’s butchering Gunga Din;

He calls for darkness and darkness comes;

Our fellow slaves invite it in.

Yet this darkness, this person, this situation, is not really as new to the world as one might think. This same darkness is “in every book ever written.”

It would be easy to find despair in this darkness. But the singer reassures us that when all hope is gone, “all that’s left is hope.” In the chorus, he asks Mary if it is too late or if they will still have each other. Maybe it is love that gets us through. “Will you be standing / Under a black and silver sky / By my side, / By the graves,/ On our death day?

The song’s title referring to “our death day” may lead one to expect a dark song. But Ryan explained to Chimesfreedom that “a death can also be the end of an idea.” In fact, he explained, the song is looking for “context and redemption, and above all, a way out.”

It is not surprising that Ryan feels a special connection to this song. Many artists have avoided the challenge of the current political situation, perhaps hoping for additional clarity with more time. Some, like Son Volt, have released an album trying to sort through current events. Others have found mostly rage. With the new single, Ryan felt compelled to dig deeper, seeking his way around to find hope and love as ways to lead all of us out of this mess.

And It’s Such a Drag

For the B-side to “On Our Death Day” Ryan reworked his song “And It’s Such a Drag.” The song originally appeared in a quieter form on his album In the Dusk of Everything (2012). On the new amped-up version, Ryan is joined by Doug Lancio (guitar), Aaron “The A-Train” Smith (drums), and Kelley Looney (bass). This group provides great energy to the song. We hope there might be an album with this lineup in the future.

Ryan explained that he included “And It’s Such a Drag” with “On Our Death Day” because the B-side is about “an intimate confrontation with a narcissist.” One should be troubled by how a song originally written about a broken relationship can work so well as a commentary on our president.

But it is the perfect B-side for “On Our Death Day.” While the A-side is about quiet redemption, the B-side’s rock sound lets out a little anger. Sometimes you need to vent before you can get around to peace and understanding.

In this context, I imagine “And It’s Such a Drag” being in the voice of a disillusioned Trump supporter, or really any American voter: “Who loves you/ More than me/ Who gave you/ All that he had.” Then, the realization that this president (lover) does not care: “And you talk about me/ Like I was just another one of your deals.” The more I listen to this song, the more I think it is about this moment right now, even though Ryan wrote it years ago. Crank it up loud.

A Leonard Cohen Cover Bonus Track

Finally, the digital version of Ryan’s “maxi-single” release includes a bonus song. Ryan covers Leonard Cohen’s song “Steer Your Way.” The tune originally appeared on Cohen’s haunting final album recorded while he was in declining health, You Want it Darker (2016). Ryan had recorded the song for a Cohen-tribute vinyl album after the 2016 election, Like a Drunk In A Midnight Choir. It is a nice addition here as a bonus track.


Cohen’s song, in the voice of one nearing the end of life, coaxes us to review our own choices and our lives. The singer advises, “Steer your heart past the Truth you believed in yesterday.” Again, I find in this song Ryan’s compassion for people who are open to growth and to changing their minds.

Ryan has disclosed that Cohen’s song helped steer him back toward hope. He adds that the lyrics to “Steer Your Way” say “so clearly what needs to be said right now.”

In releasing these three recordings together now, Ryan explained, “Each of us should do what we can to offer intelligence and beauty and conscience in contrast to this stormy weather.” With beauty, grace, contemplation, compassion, and poetry, Ryan has lived up to his end of the bargain.

Of course, those are just my impressions of the songs. You may find something different in them. To purchase “On Our Death Day” on vinyl with “And It’s Such a Drag” or as a digital maxi-single with the bonus Leonard Cohen song, head over to Matthew Ryan’s website or his Bandcamp page.

Leave your two cents in the comments.

When Cotton Gets Rotten

Tom Cotton

One ridiculous aspect about comments made by President Donald Trump regarding his preference for immigrants from Norway over immigrants from Haiti and some other African nations is the debate about his language.  Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Senator David Perdue of Georgia, who attended the Oval Office meeting, defend the president by using a bit of linguistic legerdemain.

While reliable sources confirm that Trump referred to Haiti and other countries as “shithole countries,” Trump’s allies have raised an interesting defense.  Cotton and Perdue supported Trump by denying the president said the word.  But apparently the basis for their defense is that Trump actually said “shithouse countries.”

Others may debate whether it is more or less racist to have used one term over the other.  But it is clear that politics is at a low level when you have elected Senators even making such an argument to suck up to this president.

The incident, however, probably is not a new low for politics.  Just considering Cotton’s record, one sees a man whose loyalty to ideology often trumps traditional notions of national service.  For example, during his first year in the Senate in 2015, Cotton organized other Senators to undermine President Barack Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran through a letter to the government of a foreign country.

Cotton also worked to prevent the confirmation of a highly qualified African-American woman to be the U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas because she was friends with President Obama.  The nominee, Cassandra Butts, had a distinguished career when she was nominated for a position that needed to be filled.

After a hearing about Butts’s nomination in May 2014, Cotton put a hold on her confirmation.  He later told her that he was doing it because he knew she had been friends with President Obama since law school.  And he wanted to hurt the president.  Butts spent the last 835 days of her life waiting for the confirmation before she died of acute leukemia.

“Cotton Fields”

For something nicer, when I think of rotten cotton, I go back to the classic song “Cotton Fields.”

Oh, when them cotton bolls get rotten,
You can’t pick very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home.

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, wrote “Cotton Fields.” He recorded it in 1940.

A number of famous artists have covered the song, including Odetta, Harry Belafonte, the Beach Boys, and Johnny Cash. But my favorite cover version is the one by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

The CCR version is the one I grew up listening to.  It appeared on their 1969 album Willy and the Poor Boys.

“Cotton Fields” is a wonderful song that people still enjoy more than seventy-five years after it was first recorded. By contrast, seventy-five years from now, nobody will probably remember how a man named Cotton tried to ingratiate himself to a president based on a distinction between “shithole” and “shithouse.”

Photo of cotton fields via Creative Commons and Kimberly Vardeman. What is your favorite version of “Cotton Fields”? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    The Wrong “American War”? (Book Review) (Guest Post)

    Omar El AkkadThe following book review is a Guest Post by Russ Miller, an expert on literature, film, and other things.  Russ grew up in the West and currently lives in Virginia.

    I just finished the absorbing and well-paced debut novel American War by Omar El Akkad.  It depicts a dystopian future centered on a second American civil war between the northern “blues” and the southern “reds.”  The war’s personal and national tragedy is related through the experiences of one ordinary southern family that ends up having a profound role in the conflict.

    American War’s Division

    The fissures leading to another fratricidal conflagration are mostly unexplained and unexplored.  We all know what they are – drawing as they do on the Republic’s historical, entrenched, accumulated animosities and resentments.  But the match that ignites the dry tinder this time (it is the late 21st century) is the southern states’ refusal to comply with a federal ban on the use of fossil fuels.

    The ban on fossil fuels comes too late in any case.  Global warming and the resulting rise in sea levels has left the North American continent submerged and scorched in equal measure.  Florida is already under water and the national capital has long-ago removed to Columbus, Ohio.  These conditions exacerbate the conflict.  But the cause isn’t climatic.  It is something deeper.

    American War: A novel is getting well-deserved positive reviews.  El Akkad is a Canadian-Egyptian journalist who makes terrific use of his foreigner’s objectivity towards the U.S. and the harrowing experience he’s made reporting from some of the world’s intractable conflicts.

    El Akkad brilliantly converts most of our contemporary pathologies into grist for the book’s plot:  drone wars and torture; refugee camps and foreign-supported insurrections; and the obvious nod to today’s seemingly irreconcilable hostility between “reds” and “blues.”

    Today’s Real Divide

    Still, the book’s crux – a revival of America’s north/south hostility – misses its mark.  As the last presidential election made clear, the real divide in this riven and disconsolate country centers on values and political perspectives.  The fault-line defies geography.  As Robert Kaplan reveals in his new book “Earning the Rockies,” red and blue American are not places but deeply-rooted states of mind keyed to questions of cosmopolitanism, identity-politics, and faith.  Central Mississippi now is aligned with central Pennsylvania and Central Idaho.  Similarly, New York now is aligned with Minneapolis and Lexington, Kentucky.  Mason and Dixon can’t explain Donald J. Trump’s victory, at least not as neatly as El Akkad hopes.  And besides, aren’t the northern fracking fields of Pennsylvania and North Dakota the heart of America’s new oil boom?

    To have served as a more effective critique (or cautionary parable) of our current desperate condition, El Akkad’s book would have done better to imagine a future of secular, progressive North American mega-city-states (northern and southern) that observe their own laws (Seattle may be marking the path for this) as part of a cosmopolitan, global, “blue” archipelago – a modern Hanseatic League.  The “red” rural rest should  have been portrayed as an exploited and disparaged class kept poor and at bay by brutal repression, walls, and humiliating check-points (in the way that Israel “manages” the occupied territories today).  The hinterlands would serve and resent the cities under the regressive, self-interested, and corrupt “governance” of sectarian chieftains or warlords (wouldn’t this be the Southern Baptist Convention).  Contemporary London – simply “The City” – on one hand, and present-day Syria and Iraq, on the other hand.  Those are the models for the conflict El Akkad imagines, not Charleston and Gettysburg.

    El Akkad has the right idea.  I also regret our internecine, seemingly incommensurable divisions.   But he dares too little with the truth of our current malaise.  To have seen the heart of that, El Akkad need not have traveled to Alabama.  The short trip from his home “just south of Portland, Oregon” to Oregon’s Grant County (Portland and Multnomah County were exact mirrors of Grant County in the 2016 presidential election results) – east and not south – would have done the trick.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Springsteen’s “Long Walk Home” and the Alienating Feeling of Election Results

    Bruce Springsteen released “Long Walk Home” in 2007 on his Magic album.  He wrote the song to reflect how he felt during the years of the George W. Bush presidency.

    Last night I stood at your doorstep,
    Trying to figure out what went wrong.

    “Long Walk Home” is about a guy coming back to his hometown and not recognizing anything.  As Springsteen explained about the singer’s character in The New York Times,  “The things that he thought he knew, the people who he thought he knew, whose ideals he had something in common with, are like strangers.”

    Long Walk Home

    In town I pass Sal’s grocery,
    Barber shop on South Street;
    I looked in their faces,
    They’re all rank strangers to me.

    The reference to “rank strangers” in Springsteen’s “A Long Walk Home” was inspired by the song “Rank Strangers to Me,” sometimes called “The Rank Stranger” or just “Rank Stranger.” Albert E. Brumley wrote “Rank Strangers to Me,” which was made famous by The Stanley Brothers.

    “Rank Strangers to Me” is also about a man returning to the town of his youth.  As in Springsteen’s song, the singer discovers he does not recognize anything.

    The meaning of “Rank Stranger” is open to interpretation. There is no resolution or explanation about why the singer does not recognize the people in his town. Has he died? Has everyone else died? It is a mystery that makes the song haunt you long after you have heard it.

    Similarly, in Springsteen’s song, the unrecognizable world feels alien to the singer. The meaning would be mysterious too, except that Springsteen has provided context for “The Long Walk Home.” He explained about the alienation during the Bush administration, “I think that’s what’s happened in this country.”

    It’s gonna be a long walk home;
    Hey pretty darling, don’t wait up for me;
    Gonna be a long walk home,
    A long walk home.

    While some celebrated the election results this week, many felt they were seeing their country in a way they could not recognize. Maybe Springsteen had a feeling about what was going to happen when he chose to play “Long Walk Home” outside Philadelphia’s Independence Hall during a rally for Hillary Clinton the night before the election.

    Either way, the song captures the disappointment that one side often feels after an election. But that is the nature of democracy. At one time or another, we all have to take a long walk to get back home.

    Leave your two cents in the comments. Photo by Chimesfreedom.

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    The Underdog Who Created the Red-Nosed Reindeer

    Rudolph The most famous reindeer of all first appeared in a 1939 coloring booklet entitled “Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer,” written by Robert L. May.  May’s creation of Rudolph is a fascinating story of how a down-on-his-luck catalog copy writer came to create a tale that would inspire one of the most covered holiday songs as well as one of the best Christmas TV specials.

    The Creation of Rudolph

    The retailer Montgomery Ward commissioned this coloring book for something to give out for free as a marketing tool. As May tells it, in January 1939 he was 35 years old and in debt with an ill wife, and his dreams of being a writer had been reduced to being a catalog copy writer in Chicago.

    So, May was not in a very festive mood when he was commissioned to write the book. But May’s department head thought the company could save money by creating its own promotional coloring book instead of ordering them from others.  He suggested some type of animal story.

    That night, May began to focus on a reindeer story because his daughter Barbara loved deer at the zoo. He also thought of his own lot in life, and then began to try to come up with an underdog story.

    After May came up with the idea for a reindeer with a red nose, May’s boss nixed the idea. But May went ahead and had someone create artwork of his idea, and May’s boss began to warm to the concept.

    May, who considered several names for his reindeer, continued writing into the summer. After May’s wife died that summer, May’s boss offered to let someone else finish the story, but May now felt he needed this scrappy reindeer to help him through his own tough time. By the end of August, May finished the rhyming story, reading it first to his daughter Barbara and her grandparents.

    How Rudolph Became the Most Famous Reindeer of All

    Within a decade, the story and the book illustrated by Denver Gillen would become more famous than any retailer could have imagined. And in the spirit of Christmas, the head of Montgomery Ward, Sewell Aver, did something that is hard to imagine today. After the book became popular, the company gave the rights to the story to the employee who created it, Robert May.

    May’s brother-in-law, Johnny Marks turned the story into the classic song we know.  And then cowboy crooner Gene Autry made the song a bona fide hit in 1949.

    Although Autry reportedly did not like the song at first, his wife convinced him to record it. The recording became one of the best selling records of all time. Here is Autry singing the song live several years later in 1953, where you can see the audience knows all the words too.

    Other Versions of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

    Because “Rudolph” is often seen as a kids’ song and not a religious song, through the years performers have not been shy about having fun with interpreting the song in quirky ways. For example, here is Jack Johnson’s version.

    Destiny’s Child also recorded the song, but the video is no longer available on YouTube. There also is a quirky interpretation from Jewel and Nedra Carroll.  Also, there is a nice guitar instrumental by Tommy Emmanuel and John Knowles.

    Even Tiny Tim has a version.

    In addition to the unusual versions, several artists have made popular rock interpretations, such as this one by The Jackson 5 from 1970.

    The Crystals made a famous version for the most famous rock Christmas album of all time, A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963).  And our most-famous Christmas singer, Bing Crosby, eventually sang the song too, although reportedly he had rejected the idea of recording it before Autry made it a hit. Unlike Crosby’s somber “White Christmas,” his “Rudolph” swings. Crosby also eventually performed an excellent version with Ella Fitzgerald.

    Finally, Regis Philbin recorded a version of the song.  He also made a video featuring an animated version of himself and an appearance by an animated Donald Trump.  The video, though, is no longer available on YouTube.

    There seems to be a version for every taste, ensuring that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer will go down in history.

    The 1964 TV Special Version

    Of course, there also is the classic 1964 TV special, which first aired on NBC on December 6, 1964. That show was scored by May’s brother-in-law and the song’s composer Johnny Marks, who also wrote “Holly Jolly Christmas.”

    That is another story. But the TV special did create another classic version of the song by Burl Ives, who played the snowman. This version may be the one you are most likely to hear today.

    May’s Reward

    As for Rudolph’s creator Robert May, he once noted that his reward “is knowing every year, when Christmas rolls around” Rudolph brings a message about a “loser” using a handicap to find happiness, a story enjoyed by millions both young and old.

    Deep down we are all underdogs, so may the new year bring you many moments of shouting out with glee.

    What is your favorite version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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