\n\t \n\tThe first time I ever wrote anything political was probably \u201cChristmas in Washington.\u201d When I wrote that, I was connecting with Woody Guthrie<\/a> because he was a socialist. When he was writing, a lot of poor people, especially people in the Dust Bowl area who got fucked over, became socialists. They wrote songs about things that were going on, and those songs got rewritten using the same melodies. They called that folk music.<\/p>\n \n\tI think the common denominator with protest songs is the singalong. That\u2019s because before there was mass media, you had meetings, including union meetings, and everyone would sing together. You can sing ideas that you can\u2019t say, and people will process them differently and probably more positively than if you just tell them or make them read it off a printed page. That\u2019s what protest songs do.<\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019re all post-Bob Dylan songwriters today, but Neil Young hit it out of the park when he wrote \u201cOhio\u201d in response to Kent State. He uses very few words in the song. It\u2019s largely just \u201cTin soldiers and Nixon coming\/We\u2019re finally on our own\/This summer I hear the drumming\/Four dead in Ohio.\u201d That\u2019s broadside writing. It\u2019s like a newspaper headline or a Phil Ochs song.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tThe death penalty became my issue because Tim Robbins called me and asked me to write a song for his film Dead Man Walking<\/em>. I ended up writing several songs about the issue, including \u201cEllis Unit One,\u201d for the movie. People have come up to me and said, \u201cA song you wrote changed my mind about the death penalty.\u201d So you can\u2019t tell me music doesn\u2019t change the world, because the only way you change the world is one heart at a time. And music hits your heart as well as your head. That\u2019s why you can sing things you can\u2019t say.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tI wrote [2002\u2019s] \u201cJohn Walker\u2019s Blues\u201d about John Walker Lindh, the American who joined the Taliban. I wrote it from his POV. Everybody said, \u201cYou\u2019re crazy. You can\u2019t do that.\u201d There wasn\u2019t an artist who didn\u2019t think I was crazy for doing it. But I saw a 20-year-old, emaciated kid duct-taped to a board. My son Justin Townes Earle and John Walker Lindh were months apart in age. And that\u2019s where the song came from. Facts are empathy. That song alienated a lot of people, but some people got it. And I think it might have helped some people overcome their fear.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat\u2019s happening right now is mainly about Bruce Springsteen. He went to Minneapolis with Tom Morello right after the ICE killings there and played a brand-new protest song, \u201cStreets of Minneapolis.\u201d I was ashamed when I saw that. I went, \u201cOK, I\u2019m supposed to be the fucking political songwriter here. I better get off my fucking ass.\u201d<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n \n\tBut look, I\u2019ve never been a lefty who believed for one second this was a left-of-center country. It\u2019s not. It was founded by rich farmers who didn\u2019t want to pay their fuckin\u2019 taxes, and some of them wanted to continue to own slaves. I was taught that Texas bought Mexico because they hated our freedom, but actually Antonio L\u00f3pez de Santa Anna attacked the Alamo because the Texans were holding slaves. We\u2019re not taught that in school. Slavery was illegal in Mexico. So we all grew up with all the lies that we grew up with, and it\u2019s going to take a lot of songs to change some of them.<\/p>\n \n\tThe country leaned left out of necessity for a period in the 20th century. The New Deal had a lot to do with it, but immediately people in power were trying to undo that. They worked at it, and they worked at it, and they worked at it. Now, they\u2019ve finally done it. But we got this reprieve from becoming what we finally fucking are now for a lot of years, mainly because of the generation that grew up on protest songs.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t<\/span>ob Dylan<\/a> had a term for protest songs<\/a> back when he was writing them. As deeply poetic as they are, he called them finger-pointing songs. \u201cMasters of War\u201d was the ultimate finger-pointing song. \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind\u201d was one too. I think a lot of people have sung that song never even realizing it was a protest song. They didn\u2019t think of it that way.<\/p>\n\n
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