Life is a blur these days, and so was this tour, but here are some blurry reflections.
There have been times when among various other forms of creative output, I might write a reflective sort of essay as often as every few days. Lately, having much time for thinking that goes beyond attempting to digest the latest bout of propaganda and/or the latest volley of missiles seems like a distant luxury.
But there have been so many moments in the course of my travels where up-close, real-life, physical observations of reality in a particular place and time have seemed so valuable. Like when I went to Texas, Georgia, and Arizona last winter without seeing any physical displays of Trump support anywhere I went. From my social media feeds, I would not get the impression that this kind of thing would be possible in any of those states.
So, I'll endeavor to pause the clock for a moment and reflect a bit on this tour in Europe that I just returned home from, that took Kamala and I to various parts of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, and Scotland. If the reflections seem blurry, it's because that's how they seem to me, too.
Before writing travelogues like this one, I often review various sources from the period of the travels, and just prior to them, to see what else was going on, put life into some context. I note this morning that generally I've been writing a lot of songs, and very little else.
I guess I learned from my parents to prioritize in certain ways. Both accomplished professional musicians, the priority at home growing up with them was always in favor of live music. If any child or adult was endeavoring to play or practice or whatever, that was more important than whatever else anyone might have wanted to do at that time, in that room, or even in the backseat of that car.
I still seem to have these priorities, so in recent months if I wake up with a song idea, writing the song and bringing it to life always becomes the priority, at the expense of everything else that isn't related to parenting or other basic functions. Tour-booking, essay-writing, reflecting on life in general, responding to emails, all goes more or less out the window. Driven to do my best to musically document the reality unfolding so rapidly around us, I've written a lot of songs, and very little else -- and whatever I'm doing beyond this summer is a lot more up in the air than it normally would be at this stage of the game, as well, as a direct consequence.
As I start to actually think about it, the tour just over was wonderful, but not because I did a good job at all in the tour-booking department over the past few months -- I definitely did not. Also, having my YouTube channel deleted and important functions on Facebook disabled throughout much of the tour-booking process did not help matters at all.
The reasons it was a great tour were largely down to several of the gigs being planned already over a year prior, and otherwise mostly to a certain cohort of folks in different countries who are the same ones who so reliably can be called on to host another event every year or so, such as in most of the cities we played in.
The tour began in Germany, a country I've spent quite a bit of time in in my life, especially around the turn of the century. Kamala has spent very little time there, but both of us had heard and seen lots on social media and through other sources in recent years about the violent things that happen to so many people when they protest against arming Israel or in support of Palestinians, on the streets of German cities. During our time in various parts of Germany, in any case, we encountered no open hostility to the kaffiyehs both of us were wearing most every day. (A few dirty looks, though, quite possibly.)
Our first gig on the tour was one of the ones planned well in advance, which was an event on the occasion of the centenary of the existence of the Heideruh Center, outside Hamburg.
I wrote songs about two of the founders of the center -- Franz Jacob and Katharina Jacob -- which was why we were invited to sing at the commemorative event.
Heideruh was originally a retreat center for communists and other antifascists, in the vein of retreat centers and summer camps in so many different countries that were probably at their most popular around that period of the twentieth century. After being occupied by the Nazis during the twelve-year period of Hitler's rule, Heideruh became a retreat center for family members of those imprisoned or otherwise persecuted during the Third Reich. The father of the current director of the center spent the entire twelve years of Hitler's reign in a windowless prison cell in Hamburg.
Until this tour with its three gigs in Germany, I had not been to Germany in many years. Since Israel began its genocidal war upon the people of Gaza in 2023, I had heard nothing from any of the Germans. I was writing lots of songs against Israel's war on Gaza that were certainly appreciated by the many Germans on my email list and those who are financial supporters as members of my CSA, but none of them were coming forward anymore to offer to organize a gig next time I'm in Europe. It's always random whether anyone will make such an offer when I'm making announcements about planning another visit, but the consistency among the Germans in this instance seemed notable.
And also not at all surprising. The question of Israel and support or criticism of it in Germany is pretty much the most sensitive political issue possible there. I don't think most Germans have significantly different views on the subject relative to those of their European neighbors, but they are definitely much more reticent about expressing those views.
The two gigs we had in Germany after Heideruh were in Kassel and Berlin. In Kassel it was organized by youthful members of the DKP, the German Communist Party. In Berlin it was young anti-Zionist folk from Ireland living in Berlin, organizing as the Irish Block.
At least with two of the three gigs in Germany there were Germans involved with organizing them, but I was still reminded on various occasions while in Germany of the first pro-Palestinian protest I ever attended in that country, in Hamburg around 2000, when I was one of maybe three non-Arab people in attendance, among many hundreds of mostly Palestinians.
At least in Kassel, in any case, we met young German leftists who were as capable of being critical of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian struggle as their counterparts in other European countries.
While this was refreshing, it's also important to point out that this was not new. It's only new in terms of the past 30 years or so. Before that, the most dominant factions on the German left -- those that identified with the term "anti-imperialist" -- were fully capable of being supportive of the Palestinian cause and critical of Israel's policies, just as they were fully capable of being critical of the imperial policies of the USA, and of course most especially of the arms sales and other policies of their own government.
All of the three gigs in Germany were well-attended, though in Berlin we lost a bunch of the audience because Kamala and I didn't go on until several hours after many people thought things would be starting. At the end of the evening, mostly after the folks running the venue had turned out the lights and left the premises, Phil Butland interviewed me at a picnic table in the dark for The Left Berlin.
It was a busy tour -- five weeks on the road altogether, including flying time, with 19 gigs, and often a lot of long drives in between them. But on our free days we used our time together largely learning new songs and recording them with my fancy new Chinese camera, which is such a fine piece of tech that the US recently banned it, soon after I bought the last one available for purchase in any Best Buy in the state of California, when Kamala and I were last on tour.
To say we were learning new songs is a bit of an odd way to put it, since I wrote the songs we were learning. To say I wrote the songs is also far from entirely accurate. I wrote them with my musical collaborator, who I call my AI band, or I just anthropomorphize her entirely with a Japanese woman's name I chose for her, Ai Tsuno.
This was the first tour we've done where much or even most of the songs we did at most of the shows were songs I wrote with my AI collaborator over the past eight months.
I had been especially keen to do shows full of these recently-written songs. While I wouldn't want to do a show with only recent material, out of respect for the folks who may have traveled for hours in the hope of hearing a particular song I wrote 25 or 12 years ago, what I was craving was real-world feedback from live audiences to these songs.
Here's where we begin a lengthy tangent reflecting on music, the music industry, and writing songs in collaboration with AI.
Most performers we've become familiar with in places like the US over the past century of the existence of the corporate music industry did not write any of the material they recorded. The industry does its best to mystify the whole process, and imbue the artists they promote with supernatural abilities of all kinds, but in reality it's all very compartmentalized and systematic, the hit-making machinery. There are songwriters, there are recording artists and studio musicians, and there are performers. They're all different people.
The performers are generally required by the industry they work for to more or less pretend they wrote all the lyrics, all the music, and came up with all the dance moves. They're geniuses, which of course is why they're able to pack a stadium. A pop star would never mention to the crowd before singing a song who wrote the lyrics and who wrote the music, and which music promoter successfully convinced their manager that they should be the artist to make this gem a chart-topper. That's not how the spell is cast.
We live in a society that is meant to be obsessed with originality, and often actually is, as well. People naturally take the bait, which is largely of a corporate nature, as the corporations try to sell their artistic products with claims of uniqueness of every kind.
For every style of music that embraces glitz and glamor and the mystification of the arts, there are counter-trends. In the folk music scene in places like Greenwich Village in the early 1960's, for example, the notion of originality was so thoroughly rejected that songwriters sought to present their recent compositions as songs written a century earlier. If they succeeded in fooling their audience into thinking their own songs were actually traditional ones, then they had written the kind of song they were aiming to write. For many people, the point was never to take credit for the song in the first place, the point was to show that you had fully grokked this musical tradition that you were part of, as demonstrated by your audience's inability to tell the difference between old and new.
For those of us who are part of this folk music tradition, we embrace what Pete Seeger called "the folk process," whereby songs and musical traditions evolve over time, as they are influenced by different societies, forms of art, particular performers or recording artists, etc. The concept of the folk process, and music and art as a collective commons -- like languages or recipes or knowledge of the properties of medicinal plants -- rejects the very notion of originally, to a huge extent.
As an artist coming out of this kind of tradition -- a tradition fully revived in different forms, but just as dramatically, by the "three chords and the truth" punk ethos, as well as by the hip-hop ethos of sampling everything and anything an artist wants to make part of their work -- I embraced working with AI music-generation platforms, when I discovered how powerful they had become. Sure, I found the power of the platforms to be both wildly impressive as well as terrifying. Yes, I could see how disruptive the technology would be, along with all the other kinds of AI technology currently transforming life as we know it. But the power was undeniable.
The people who used to code for a living and are now telling the AI coding platforms what to code for them say they are creating code that is just as good as it was before, but they are doing it five, ten, or twenty times faster.
Anyone who has ever worked for a for-profit corporation probably doesn't need me to tell them that when this kind of tech exists, it will become ubiquitous. Obviously, if coders can work twenty times as fast and just as well, their bosses will tell them to use these platforms, whether they want to do it or not.
I have discovered that it is exactly the same with the music-generation platforms for writing songs, as it is with the coding platforms for writing code. But for a musician like me, ostensibly at least free of the shackles of a corporate boss telling me what to do or how to do it, why do I need to vastly increase my creative output? And in so doing, is the art suffering in any way? Is the music I'm creating with my AI band as good as what I'd write without the aid of AI? Is it better? Worse? Can this even be accurately measured or determined?
When people know a song they're listening to is being performed by an AI band, they tend to be immediately turned off to the music, with a feeling like they're being deceived. So I was particularly interested to see how people would react to songs I wrote with my AI band that Kamala and I had "made our own" by figuring out good acoustic, two-voices-and-guitar renditions of them. I wanted to do this not to deceive anyone -- but if I am deceiving anyone in this process, it is to deceive for the greater good, to make a broader point, which is that originality isn't important. What's important is what a song does to you.
Whether it's a song written hundreds of years ago, or music written hundreds of years ago with updated lyrics, or allegedly "new" music and "new" words, what matters -- for those of us who embrace these concepts inherent to "the folk process" and the collective cultural commons -- is how well the song or the music works.
What performers seek to do is to cast a spell on their audiences. Whoever wrote a song they're singing -- whether it was them, partially them, or someone else entirely -- if it's a sad song, they want to make their audience cry. If it's a funny song, they want to make people laugh. If it's a song about injustice, they want to make their audiences feel like marching through the streets. Whoever wrote the song, this is what we want to do with our audiences, how we want them to feel. We know a song is working when it has the desired result. We measure the sad songs by the volume of tears shed -- not by anyone's ideas about how original or unoriginal, old or new, trad or punk the song may be.
Not at all surprisingly, the Ai Tsuno cover songs that made up so much of our sets on this tour went over as well as my other songs do. The sad ones make people cry, and the funny ones make them laugh. The fact that my lyrics were ably supported by the musical ideas of an AI band that I worked with to come up with the music is not something anyone would be likely to notice. Not just because I don't tell the audiences which songs were written with AI assistance. But because there is a consistency to all of the songs. Due to my deep involvement with coming up with the music for each one of them. But also due in no small part to the fact that there are only so many folk punk-friendly chord progressions out there, and both Ai Tsuno and I have already used them all many times.
The consistency -- the musicality of each song -- is born out of the fact that not only is the platform amazing tech, but as the producer and prompt engineer, I'm looking for certain sounds, and I'm rejecting the vast majority of what it comes up with before I eventually land on the right kind of music and phrasing, etc., for the spell I'm trying to cast. But being the magician who already knows what kinds of spells work and what kinds don't, I know when a song is done, in a way that the uninitiated won't. This is the nature of being a professional working with a platform intended for use by people with a certain skill set. Same with the AI coding platforms.
The proof, however, is in the pudding, and was in evidence at every gig on this tour. Do I need to be writing a new song with my AI band almost daily? Is this level of output necessary? No, certainly not. It's more of a burden in many ways. But given that the quality of each of these new songs is right up there with anything else I've written in the past 25 years, the temptation to exercise the capacity to musically comment on even more news stories and historical anecdotes is irresistible. Or at least reasons to resist the temptation are over-ruled by the results of embracing it.
Lengthy tangent over.
One of the new songs we sang at almost every gig was "Last Morning," which I wrote after the US-Israeli sneak attack on Iran, which took the lives of hundreds of school girls, along with the highest religious figure in Shia Islam, and much of his extended family and the surrounding neighborhood. Everywhere we went, this song in particular inspired reactions which I find to be a fascinating insight into the differing understandings of reality that can exist within a given society.
Almost every time we did a show and sang that song, afterwards I was approached by a member of the audience with some kind of Muslim, Arab, Iranian, or south/west Asian background. Often with tears in their eyes, they told me how much they were moved by this song.
On multiple occasions after shows involving the singing of this song, I was also approached -- sometimes only afterwards in the form of a message online -- by white Europeans who were not of any kind of Muslim or Asian background, who had taken offense to the song, because they see it as somehow supportive of the Islamic Republic that the US is currently actively trying to wipe out.
When I eventually do a tour of parts of the US and sing this song at those gigs, I'll be interested to see what kinds of reactions I get from audience members. Probably similar, in every way.
One of Glenn Diesen's recent guests was talking about how totalitarianism develops in what we call "the west." The model of totalitarian development he described is first you have a corporate-controlled media ecosystem that creates a society's consensus, and a society's range of acceptable views, around a wide range of issues. Then this overwhelmingly brainwashed population gets to vote between different corporate-sponsored candidates offering viewpoints that are within the acceptable range of debate.
Whether we're talking about the spiffy social democracies of northern Europe, or the run-down post-industrial corners of England, or the USA, very few people seem to have any significant knowledge about Iran, or the region surrounding it. Any knowledge they do think they have has either been fed to them by the corporate media ecosystem and it just isn't accurate, or it's knowledge based on events that took place 47 years ago, after which point they lost interest in the subject.
I like to ask people the question, name a terrorist attack -- you know, the kind involving mass civilian casualties, not resistance attacks on occupying armies -- name one terrorist attack that Iran has supported over the past 47 years. So far no one has been able to give me an answer.
One of the other things I was asking people, specifically in Denmark, was whether they had ever heard of a Danish woman named Elise Thomsen. I asked people of various ages, provided context, and universally received the answer, "no."
Danish culture is one in which participants embrace humility, among many other wonderful values. The effort of the group is emphasized far more readily than the efforts of any individual. There's so much good to be said about this orientation. But it still surprises me sometimes, how this can manifest in ways that mean a society might stand to basically forget the contributions of such standouts as Elise Thomsen. We learned this song I wrote with Ai Tsuno about Elise, in time to sing it at our show in Aalborg on May 1st.
Touring around Scandinavia, it's always hard for me to believe it's possible to have any kind of gig where you might get paid to see such scenery. Even with much of the country being under construction at the moment -- they're building a tunnel from the island of Fyn in Denmark to the European mainland in Germany -- driving across Denmark is so beautiful. Even the multi-lane highway is calming.
Seeing Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Oslo again, along with old friends and comrades, is always such a profound pleasure. The weather was mostly cool and breezy and beautiful, cloudy but generally not raining. There were many walks around these lovely cities, and other smaller ones as well, though never enough of any of that.
Wherever we went in Scandinavia, we had the feeling of staying in paradise. Our free time in the Copenhagen area was divided between staying with old friends at a cohousing community in Roskilde surrounded by forest, farmland, and walking paths, or with old friends in Ballerup, beside a huge public forest. Our night in Gothenburg was spent in a hotel overlooking medieval boats docked in the harbor. In Oslo we stayed in a beautiful, woodsy neighborhood that is apparently a no-go area for the Oslo middle class, as it contains a percentage of immigrants in the community that causes it to be characterized as a ghetto by white people driving through in their Teslas.
As we were driving through Norway, along with everywhere else in Europe, we were often listening to the latest interview our favorite podcaster has done with his latest source of what his critics call Russian propaganda. Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian college professor. He briefly explored the idea of running for office, because, as he often says, every current member of the Norwegian parliament supports sending more arms to Ukraine, without exception.
Exploring questions around the Russia-Ukraine war with a lot of people in Europe we met, my impression was very similar to the impression I got around how people understand the history of Iran and the war against Iran -- not very well. I often wondered, once again, if these people with their many opinions about the Russian government and the Ukrainian right to self-determination had ever bothered to read a book about the history of Russia in this century, or the history of the efforts of NATO and the US to influence proceedings and create facts on the ground in Ukraine and other former Soviet countries? And also, had they ever bothered to think hard about what final result they are hoping for, if their side wins this war? What would that look like? What would their home town look like? The lack of knowledge and the lack of reflection around these questions that I encounter wherever I go is so alarming.
In between Oslo and Gävle we visited friends from Florida who have just bought a run-down house in rural Sweden for $14,000 -- less than what I pay for rent in a year. Nice place, on nice land, with lots of potential. Perhaps I'll follow them there soon. Like most of the radicals I know from the US, the idea of needing to make a quick escape is always in the back of my mind.
One of the other gigs that was planned so far in advance that both of the main performers forgot all about it for probably several months was the event in Brighton, England, marking the anniversary of the 1926 general strike in Great Britain, and the Battle of Lewes Road in Brighton in particular. I was already well into trying to organize this tour when someone mentioned the idea of organizing a gig in Brighton, and somehow or other it occurred to me to check my Google Calendar, where I realized then I already had a plan for Brighton. I then reminded Robb Johnson about the gig we had both committed to and forgotten about.
It ended up being a great gig, in any case, for which Robb and I both wrote songs.
We were in between gigs in London when I got an email from someone calling my attention to the actions of the Pakistani government, in recently arresting the leadership of the Awami Action Committee in the region of Pakistani-administered Kashmir known as Gilgit-Baltistan. Soon after getting that email I got another, and then over the course of the next 24 hours or so, three more. Each different, each eloquently beseeching me, specifically, to support the imprisoned leadership of the committee.
Reading up on the great work of the leader of the group, Ehsan Ali, in uniting so many different sorts of people in the support of basic and broadly popular demands like controls on the price of wheat, it was obvious to me that I had to write a song about him, at least. It was equally obvious that the fact that the committee needed to make these demands again was because the government was trying to go back on their prior agreement to subsidize wheat prices. And the fact that this was happening when it was happening was absolutely a consequence of the US war on Iran, and the resulting impact on global shipping, and the skyrocketing prices of commodities of all sorts, such as food, fuel, and fertilizer.
It was just after I wrote the song about Ehsan Ali that I got a message from Reuben, who had been one of the organizers of another wonderful show at the London Action Resource Center. He was writing to make sure I was aware that the Duke of Devonshire owned an antiquarian book shop in London at which he was involved with some protest organizing, due mainly to the fact that said duke also owns a mountain in the Republic of Ireland, where he intends to raise the fees charged to tenant farmers seeking to graze their sheep. Now, in the allegedly independent part of that island, in 2026. Next song.
We got to have a brief visit and sing with our longtime friend, comrade, and musical collaborator, Lorna McKinnon in Glasgow. One of the projects I've been engaged with in recent months especially has been trying to take boring slogans and make them more interesting, in the form of songs, and singable refrains. We demonstrated at many of the gigs how well they can work.
Kamala and I had already played around southern England, about to head north to play in Middlesbrough and Glasgow (having no gigs in between London and Middlesbrough due to aforementioned distracted tour-planning efforts), when I got a message from someone in Denmark, asking if we had May 20th free. Soon we had plane tickets from London to back to Copenhagen, which we had just left ten days earlier.
The unexpected return trip to Denmark was certainly the most moving evening of the tour, surrounded as we were by grieving friends, relatives, and comrades of Mads Gram, a longtime socialist organizer in Denmark, and participant in International Solidarity Movement activities in and around occupied Palestine, who had just died suddenly earlier in the month, at the age of 40.
What was also so moving about the evening for me, in addition to seeing how everyone was dealing with the sudden death of their loved one, was having this unusual opportunity to reunite briefly with so many people I used to see around often, but who I hadn't seen in many years, or often decades.
People who spend their teenage years or their early twenties hanging around SUF (socialist youth front) comrades or going to shows at Ungdomshuset (the House of Youth) generally grow up to be leftwing adults, but you don't see them at the shows anymore. They grow up and maybe get a cool job working for a union or an NGO, but from the vantage point of the leftwing musician like me, they're gone, or much less visible, than when I'd see them in the audience and talk with them over a cigarette outside after the show. In many cases by now they've even quit smoking, and they're drinking less, too.
In my experience as a touring artist, I often play for young people, and I often play for older folks, who are retired. The common thread in both cases is they have more free time than people who are raising small children while working 30 or 40 or 50 hours a week. I often meet teenagers who tell me they grew up listening to my music, and they tell me about their parents, who are fans, but they don't bring their parents with them most of the time. For their parents, those days ended when they had kids, due to time constraints and maybe other factors.
So, there was something really special about hanging out with all these people now in their forties, who were in their teens or early twenties when we last spent much time together. In some cases, as grown up as they now appear, I can still see the scrawny punk kid they used to be, and they still see in me the much older adult leftwinger who came to sing for the kids, though now they're in their forties and raising small children, and I'm in my fifties, doing the same thing, and the age difference seems much less pronounced.
The last gig on the tour was at the Islington Folk Club, which was also the last of the gigs which had been planned a year or more in advance. The folk club has existed in a few different venues over the decades, but as a folk club, it's the place I've played in most consistently, since I first started touring in England over a quarter of a century ago. This evening we played there, the house band and the other acts were especially in good form. One of them did a brilliant rendition of a Robb Johnson song, which was not the first Robb Johnson cover I heard on this tour, either. Having heard Kamala and I do "Song for Tomorrow" at the folk club, the man said he was going to learn it next.
At all of our shows in England and Scotland, I think without exception, there was at least one member of the audience who had recently been arrested for the crime of holding a sign saying something along the lines of "I support Palestine Action, I oppose genocide." If memory serves, it was at our last gig, in Islington, that the audience included the first of the octogenarians to be arrested for this particular terrorism-related offense.
