VIA PRESS RELEASE | Next month Americans will get set to vote in the presidential primaries, kicking off nine months of what might be the most important election in this nation’s history.
On January 31, Petaluma Records will release Stop, Hey What’s That Sound: Classic Protest Songs Reinvented—a call to action, featuring liner notes from famed music critic Rob Tannenbaum. Today they premiere the latest single, an updated cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” featuring Sasha Dobson. Dobson grew up in Santa Cruz, CA in a musical family: her dad, a jazz pianist, and her mom a well-known singer. Sasha moved to Brooklyn at 17, releasing five solo albums and EPs, touring with Willie Nelson and Norah Jones, with whom she started the Americana trio, Puss N Boots, along with Catherine Popper. Proceeds from the single, out Friday, will go to support Headcount.org.
In 2016, when Trump was elected, political pundits and cultural vanguardists, while trying to look on the bright side of a global catastrophe, predicted Trump’s election would catalyze a great new era of protest songs, a revival of punk-rock activism and idealism. The children of Joe Strummer and Joan Baez would run free and set fire to our culture, purifying it by burning it… We’re still waiting.
Acclaimed songwriter and producer, Roger McEvoy Greenawalt, who has worked with Strummer, Nils Lofgren, Iggy Pop, Ric Ocasek, and Rufus Wainwright, among others, got out his sling-shot. After moving from New York to Los Angeles, Greenawalt launched Petaluma Records with his cousin Nion McEvoy, the illustrious Chairman & CEO of San Francisco’s Chronicle Books, and co-executive producer of the wildly successful Mr. Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor.
On Stop, Hey What’s That Sound: Classic Protest Songs Reinvented, Greenawalt and his virtual Rolodex of friends recast some of the best-known Boomer anthems, snatching them back from car commercials and PBS fundraising drives in order to reinvigorate them with new sounds, rhythms, and melodies. Greenawalt chose songs mostly from the 1960s and early 1970s, thinking specifically about icons whose songs are so familiar, we don’t even think about what they mean: Joni Mitchell, Curtis Mayfield, John Fogerty, John Lennon, Neil Young, and Stevie Wonder. The album ends with a ringer: a 1990s song, by No Doubt, that isn’t usually classified as a protest song.
TRACKLIST:
1. Renee Holiday & Nigel Harrison of Blondie “People Have the Power” (released by Patti Smith, 1988)
2. Sasha Dobson “Big Yellow Taxi” (released by Joni Mitchell, 1970)
3. Ryan Miller (of Guster) “People Get Ready” (released by Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, 1965)
4. Dawn Landes “For What It’s Worth” (released by Buffalo Springfield, 1966)
5. LOLO “Fortunate Son” (released by Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969)
6. Kristin Andreassen “Get Together” (released by The Youngbloods, 1966)
7. Jonah Smith “Revolution” (released by The Beatles, 1968)
8. Victoria Reed “Ohio” (released by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 1970)
9. Fiona Silver “Eve of Destruction” (released by Barry McGuire, 1965)
10. Brent Carter “Living For the City” (released by Stevie Wonder, 1973)
11. Joanna Wallfisch “Just A Girl” (released by No Doubt, 1995)
Bonus Track – Prince Rama “In The Year 2525” (released by Zager and Evans, 1969)
