I don’t know what to make of anything that’s going on right now. It seems to me we are in the midst of a seismic shift. Kids are graduating from college with no place to get jobs. Veterans of their craft are sitting on the sidelines. People are losing their houses - their hope, and their sense of the Great American Dream. Whole sectors of endeavor have been devalued. Are we turning into a society of lords and serfs? Where are you supposed to go? How are you supposed to make ends meet? Sometimes I don’t know what is more soul crushing, being underemployed, or not being employed at all. On this Labor Day, take a knee to be thankful if you have a job. And if you don’t have a job, we wish you a speedy resolution to finding one. Here is a pleading note to American business leaders, “We want to work. We want to buy your products; but soon we won’t be able to, and frankly, I don’t know if that benefits anybody!”
Matt King has today’s video for Labor Day from a session we filmed with him solo at MusicFest in Steamboat Springs in January. He absolutely ices the emotions at hand in ”Hard Luck Road,” strumming to keep the devil away and to keep the wolf from your door. Pouring all the emotion into song - though songs don’t sell the way they used to. It doesn’t much matter. Some people were just born to deliver the social commentary for their time, and Matt is one whose time will come. You won’t hear this on pop radio stations; it comes from a deeper place. It is folk music, and that addresses the cyclical, the common currency of the human condition. But there ain’t nothing common about this song. “Hard Luck Road.”
-Jessie Scott