Paula Boggs Band
“Get Together”
Songs Of Protest
Finally, someone who’s been there in the trenches and gets it. Songs of Protest is Paula Boggs and her band’s answer to the state our country is in. What a beautiful album. All the great protest songs revitalized for a new generation. Covering people like the Youngbloods and Joni Mitchell is ballsy, but that is what Boggs is like: the Dylan, the Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Joan Baez of this era. Here is Paula’s resume:
Paula is an Army veteran who serves on the boards of KEXP Radio, Peabody Conservatory and the video and audio technology company Avid. She was appointed to the President’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2013, and her resume also includes a five-year stint as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, working as a vice president at Dell and general counsel for Starbucks. She has been recognized by NASDAQ and Fortune as one of the best legal minds in the US and served on the White House Iran Contra task force before switching gears a few years ago and creating music full time.
I for one am glad she chose music. The band, and what a band it is, consists of Paula Boggs: vocals, guitar, ukelele, songwriter; Mark Chinen:
acoustic and electric guitar, banjo; Isaac Castillo: acoustic and electric bass, vocals; Tim Conroy: keyboards, accordion, melodica, trumpet, vocals; Tor Dietrichson: percussion, vocals; Sandy Greenbaum:
drums, music director. Comparisons to Gil-Scott Heron are obvious, but there is also Janis Ian in her. It’s urban folk protest music for a new, but not better, world.