While in the high desert of northern New Mexico this August for a few weeks to escape the apocalyptic Texas summer heat, I went on a computer, social media, and television fast. During this time I read a lot, including a copy of Carl Sandburg’s “The American Songbag“, a collection of folk and minstrel songs he published in 1927. I was struck by the rawness of the lyrics to these songs, and also how – almost a hundred years later – they still describe with great clarity the America we live in today. I took lots of notes and did lots of sketches on how to contemporize these songs for our current age. When I got back to Texas (and my laptop) I began recording the tracks and generating the artwork for the videos. This project began in late August of 2023 – who knows when it will end? – there are 100s of songs in the book…
For this specific set (Volume 1?), I stopped at 9 songs that told the story of America today I wanted to tell. The American Devil introduced in the first song was a natural choice to be the narrator for the other songs. The artwork in the video is all generated by MidJourney and then edited and animated in the Adobe Creative Suite using techniques I learned at the UTSA Southwest School of Art. You can watch the videos of the individual songs, or watch a long form video with narration by the American Devil which includes screenshots of the sheet music from Sandburg’s book.
This very special project is dedicated to my brother-in-law Sam Angoori, whose passion for the arts has inspired me for years. Check out his paintings at www.samangoori.com.
Music available on all the major streaming platforms.