When I left my suburban upbringing as a young adult, I immediately sought urban life. On first moving to Detroit from its suburbs back in the late 1980s, I immediately took to long walks of exploration. Even earlier in the last century, radical philosophers celebrated the revolutionary implications of such wandering as “an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban.”
On the title track to the new My Politic album (out everywhere since May 23), I sense a visionary & vibrant connection to urban pilgrims everywhere. Just as I walked to discover Detroit decades ago, singer & songwriter Kaston Guffey is seeking surprises on the streets of his new home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, & in this case the psychogeography is boldly & blissfully infused with psychedelics. Pittsburgh provides setting & character for the new songs, a special city that blends east coast & midwest with an always Appalachian mystery.
Guffey sings,
I’m gonna take me a bus
Out to the museum of art
And eat just enough mushrooms
to have my mind blown apart
Follow the crooked streets
All the way home
Talk to strangers & bury my phone
The song “Signs of Life” (& the rest of the album too) narrates magic & wonder inside the same world so often wrought with uncertainty & grief. The entire set invokes “all this joy & all this misery.” Guffey builds emotional universes that are alternately cosmic & claustrophobic, sometimes saying the loud part quietly in that way that folk singers are wont to do. With the title track, that gift is singalong infectious, inviting listeners to return again & again to the rambunctious font of embracing said uncertainty & celebrating the urban wild.
I discovered this prophetic folk duo in early 2022, right after their 2021 record Short-Sighted People In Power had dropped. Known as the duo of Guffey with Nick Pankey, their albums include guest musicians to fill out the sound. The first time I saw My Politic at Nashville’s OG Basement, they shared a bill with Adeem The Artist, & I approached & reflected on that evening with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the incisive pertinence of the protest lineage with indie folk music. That protest tradition shows up most prominently on this outing with the blazing “Will We Ever Make It Out Of Heaven Alive.”
Theologically & poetically, “hell” is often the preferred metaphor for the place from which the world needs a prison break. But not with this song. With this song, we are trapped in an unholy heaven of the hateful remnant. Due to the toxic certainty of the fundamentalists & nationalists crowding the churches, it’s no wonder that heaven suddenly feels even more carceral, an eternal punishment not fit for fugitive folksingers & all their freaky friends.
This track reminds me of an old, old Flaming Lips number where the narrator rebuffs a street evangelist with the truism that “hell’s got all the good bands.” This might be the only proper full-stop protest anthem within the album’s 13 songs, so war, religious hypocrisy, gun violence, & capitalism all get their due. The track’s title is a question & the album vibes an authentic appetite of holy desperation that we might not have all the answers. We might be losing against authoritarians, but we aren’t giving up, we are at least singing with truth & revelation from within the confines of a live-streamed catastrophe.
I saw My Politic in person at another Basement show a couple years after that 2022 introduction. In early spring 2024, I brought my 80-something mother. We had struck out on getting Bob Dylan tickets in Georgia, & this show felt close enough to Dylan, but much more intimate, like the early Dylan we would soon see reenacted by Timothee Chalamet on the wide screen. After that experience, my mother genuinely wanted to know why folk songs are so sad. She might have said “depressing.” I didn’t have a good answer, except to say that sad songs make me happy. “No Other Way” certainly fits the bill for the sad-happy paradox in this collection.
But perhaps the most collectively-rendered version of that on this record is “The Lonely 21st Century,” which tracks our addictions to addiction, our data-mined daily expressions, & our “connected isolation.” Yet the gut-punch beauty of that track is just this: I am less lonely & isolated from having heard it. I am even grateful to my dreaded phone & excellent headed phones for bringing these songs directly to me. All this, of course, makes me want to pierce the isolation on the social, physical plane, which means I need to see My Politic live again, which I hope to do soon.
As good as this new My Politic album is, & it’s extremely good, the best way to experience Kaston Guffey & Nate Pankey is in their live set. The first tour with this new record starts in just a few days. You can get all the details on the album & the tour at their website www.mypoliticmusic.com -- check it out.
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