This collection of songs has been provoked by the opening months of the second Trump presidency, hence the subtitle “The First One Hundred Days.” They are not all about Trump and his collaborators. But they seem to generate out of the current atmosphere of crisis. As you may know, a “grift” is a scam, a con, a hustle. The title of this collection plays on Tales from the Crypt, a comic-book and television series of horror stories. Well, there has been plenty of horror to sing about in the first one hundred days.

Like my songs generally, these songs attempt to go beyond the headlines and symptoms to the underlying spiritual condition. And always, it comes with irony of some kind, whether its just satire or something more deeply ambiguous. Apologies for my voice being a bit raspy, owing to recording during allergy season.

“Mirror-Image” (March) opens with reflections on how Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and his first weeks in office. It begins with the Greek myth of Narcissus and Echo. It then reflects on the way in which Trump and the electorate mirror each other, and the quiet voices that guide from behind the mirror. But the poor camped out in city parks see through it.

Mirror-Image

“Zuckerberg Augustus” (March) has fun with another empire-sized ego. It is well known that Mark Zuckerberg admires Caesar Augustus, the empire-builder of another age. But here, Roman virtue becomes Meta-virtual. So put on the headset and enter the mindset.

Zuckerberg Augustus

The title, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (April), comes from a great 1920 German horror film about an evil doctor who sends a zombie-like somnambulator out to murder people at night. The film is seen by some as a protest against the authoritarian regime that had led Germany into World War I. This song looks at some of the cabinet and other key staff of the new administration as a “rogues gallery, assembled from the back of beyond.” The harpsichord accompaniment adds to the gothic horror of the song.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

“The Fifty-First State” (April) satirizes the outrageous statements Trump has made about making various sovereign nations into America’s fifty-first state, even implying coercive violence, in necessary. “The fifty-first state wants to be you.” It’s a bad idea looking for a place to happen. Somehow, as I drafted the words, I started hearing the tune, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

The Fifty-First State

“Y2K” (April) reflects back upon myself, now twenty-five years into this new century and feeling like I was left at the starting line. It’s partly a matter of my advancing age and my techno-skepticism toward the electronic trinkets that enthrall so many today. But it’s also a sense that by 2000 the “tired plot” of post-sixties America was just churning out more variations, new “thrills and spills,” progressing deeper into the present “bonfire of the vanities.”

Y2K

“Hallelujah, I’m an App!” (April) reworks an old folk-song, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” which celebrated the hobo life, That song may go back to the late nineteenth century. It was itself partly a spoof of a revival hymn (“Revive Us Again”). My song reflects on Karl Marx’s remark that the human is “a laboring appendage of capital.” But it updates that insight to the techno-capitalist system of today. The first stone tools functioned as extensions of the human hand. Now we ourselves are appendages, extensions of “some kind of plan.” So far, the system still needs humans to walk on the earth. I tried to dress up the original folk-song into something more elaborate, but finally reverted to the spare folk style of the original.

Hallelujah, I’m an App!

“White Christian Nationalists” (May) is the most blasphemous song I have ever written. But I’m about irony, not blasphemy. The blasphemies here are based upon what I have learned of and how I understand Donald Trump’s political base. It is a trifecta of identity politics “held with pride . . . and no thought of repentance” for the bad history each of those identities carries. I myself am a white, male, American Christian. So I write and sing amid those identities, but with a critical perspective the Trump base rejects with extreme prejudice. You can hear some lines from the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” here. That chestnut was written by an Anglican clergyman in 1864 for a Whitsunday children’s procession somewhere in Yorkshire. The tune was supplied by no less than Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame). So it comes to us from a similar era of imperial hubris. But I couldn’t just put new words to the hymn, which ranges beyond my vocal range. The song that developed is less martial than a confident stroll. It exudes the “friendly fascism” that Bertram Gross described during the Reagan era, in a book by that title. So the song is a satire, but it also adapts the affect of the culture it satirizes, for a deeper shade of irony.

White Christian Nationalists

“George Floyd in Gaza” (May) reflects on the parallels between the street scene of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis five years ago this month, and the world scene of the current war on Gaza. We look on in horror, wanting to help, “but who can?” This horror is shared by many Arabs, many Jews and many others of us, while “Donald and Bibi, in power and still out of prison” continue in their master plan.

George Floyd in Gaza

“Ego-Vortex” (May) may be the darkest of all these songs, in that it reflects on the ego-cravings in any of us. It’s just a larger and more dangerous vortex in people of great wealth and power. Like some speculations on black holes in space, ego-vortex can suck us into an “alternate universe.” The song is patterned after an old blues song, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” I still have the LP of a soulful rendering of it by Reverend Gary Davis, recorded at the Newport Folk Festival in the mid-1960s. I covered it ten years ago in memory of my father, who died that year (included in The Political Unconscious).

Ego-Vortex

“Bring It, Sisters!” (May) reflects on the masculinity crisis that helped fuel Donald Trump’s return to power. In an image-driven, consumer culture today, various commodities emerge as “substitute tokens for real men.” Meanwhile, right-wing politics aim to reassert patriarchy against the gains of the women’s movement over the past half-century. Certainly, many women have abetted these retrograde trends. But it’s women who will have to step up and “draw a line.” The driving R&B beat of the song expresses urgency as well as celebration.

Bring It, Sisters!

We finish with a reprise of “Hi-Yo Yahweh,” written in November 2016, just weeks after Donald Trump’s first election as President. It’s part of an earlier album on this website, Man of Irony, which includes “Paloma” and “Sophia, Sophia,” both of which explore feminine aspects of God. “Hi-Yo Yahweh” takes on the masculine aspect, a sort of Lone Ranger in this case. If the maternity of God is weighted toward unconditional love, the paternity of God is willing to say, “This has gone too far.” And that’s where I sensed America had gone in November 2016 — which was only the beginning. And now, after rejecting Trump in 2020, America has embraced him again. As Proverbs 26:11 puts it, “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly.” I can’t recall what I was doing with those two guitar tracks, but their clash feels just right.

Hi-Yo Yahweh