David Rovics album project

David Rovics has made political music for years, and has funded his work in many different ways. He tours regularly and has a kind of 1000 Club through which people to donate to help him continue his work where he operates, as Robert Fripp might say, “inside the marketplace but not as part of the marketplace”.

I once borrowed one of his regular essays to post here, because I wanted, in a small way, to help its transmission; to help it go as “viral” as these things do.

Now he has started a crowd-funding exercise to fund the production of his next album. He explains that

I wrote an album’s worth of songs over the course of the summer, which makes me want to record an album. Making albums with other musicians is really fun, and lots more people listen to those albums, as opposed to the solo acoustic ones, all of which makes me want to record an album with other musicians. But time in a studio and taking musicians away from their day jobs to make a record involves expenses, and there’s no money to be made in this sort of endeavor these days. So that, combined with the fact that my rent is covered for next month, leads me to this crowdfunder.

This is a crowdfunder for an artistic project, an album of songs, that has the prospect of being heard, but no prospect of paying for itself, even after years of streaming on Spotify to 5 or 6 thousand monthly listeners. It has the prospect of a long life on all the streaming platforms, and the prospect of playing a role in doing what music can do, in inspiring and educating a lot of people of all ages, wherever English is spoken and there is internet access. This is true of just a simple solo acoustic recording, if made professionally. But it’s much more true of a bigger sort of project.

He has also made an elevator pitch video:

You can find out more about the project, and contribute to help make it happen, by going here.

Please do.