Since his band The Glory Fires released its last studio album in 2017, there has been no shortage of reasons to feel down. Musician-poet-activist Lee Bains feels it, too. But with the new album “Old-Time Folks,” he remains resolute in making music that builds up hope even as he fends off his own moments of despair. In the song “The Battle of Atlanta,” premiering there, Bains plants sonic landmark plaques to the city’s unsung heroes in between Civil War and condo construction sites — reminders to himself and us that people have the power.
Q&A by Hannah Hayes | Photos by Wes Frazer
August 2, 2022
When Alabama-born, Atlanta-residing musician Lee Bains sent photographer Andrea Morales rough mixes of his soon-to-be-released “Old-Time Folks” so she could contribute to the album’s artwork in 2020, Morales remarked, “It’s crazy you were able to write this stuff so soon after it happened.”
She had connected one of the songs, “Outlaws,” to the murder of George Floyd, but Bains had written the track much earlier about the tragically similar murder of Michael Brown and subsequent uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. In fact, he wrote almost all of this new record right before that dark May day, the pandemic, the insurrection, the many mass shootings, and the inflation crisis, among the other dizzying events of the past two years. Still, every song from “Old-Time Folks” rings eerily prescient.
Album cover art by Nazrene Alsiro
While 2020 marked a turning point in how most Americans talk about race, class, and capitalism, Bains has been wading waist-deep in words around organizing, resistance, and intersectionality for over a decade with The Glory Fires. Fittingly, they occupy their own intersection where Fugazi meets a gospel choir meets Lucinda Williams meets Lynyrd Skynyrd meets Woody Guthrie. Bains’ voice works like a wheated bourbon, a softer fire, yet undiluted; listen to him sing “Sweet Disorder” live in a packed-out venue and it feels like shotgunning a can of Monster. That energy opens up the live album the band put out in the stretch of time between 2017’s “Youth Detention” and “Old-Time Folks.” Recorded at The Nick, Birmingham’s legendary, unapologetically grimy club underneath the Red Mountain Expressway, Bains sermonizes in between its takes with his arm outstretched over the convulsing crowd. Before launching into “We Dare Defend Our Rights,” referencing the state’s official motto, he begins: “This song is a call to defend the rights of all Alabamians, not just cis, het, white, rich, Christian, or secular Alabamians.” Failing to defend everyone’s rights, he declares before the opening howl of a guitar, is “failing to defend our goals of hospitality and warmth and friendliness and charity and solidarity … so if you want to come here and take our neighbors’ [rights], you’re going to have to come through a lot of us, motherfucker.”
This scene of Bains as a bearded white man, often in denim-on-denim-on-trucker-hat with a warbled Alabama accent delivering these progressive messages, both intricately crafted and wildly colloquial, drives much of the national press coverage of him as a novelty — almost as reductive as the meme-level attention he received for wearing his work overalls to an ICE protest with a cardboard sign reading “Southern hospitality means welcoming immigrants.” For fans, it’s his other dualities that register more profoundly. He looks at the urban South through the eyes of someone raised around its rural parts; he puts his lyrics’ acutely specific geography (e.g., The Free State of Winston) hand-in-hand with global struggles; he’s a revolutionary, but talk to him for five minutes and he’s also a sweet pea. As of last year, he’s also a construction worker and handyman whose poetry was featured in The New Yorker. That collection of food poems, “Work Lunch,” made it clear that Bains’ words, which have often been jammed tight into punk rock’s pelting cadence, deserve space and grace. “Old-Time Folks” gives them that. The concept of work, in every sense of the word from day jobs to protest to shifting old patterns of thinking, also twines through this album just like “Work Lunch.”
In “The Battle of Atlanta,” which The Bitter Southerner is premiering in the city, Bains layers lesser-known labor movements and rebellions over Atlanta as a battlefield from the past Civil War to today’s gentrification. The video does the same, plastering historical and contemporary scenery over black-and-white footage of Bains walking down the city’s sidewalks. The track’s arranged strings and crafted guitar solos in the background indicate the intentional slowdown and expansion of The Glory Fires’ sound — less Xeroxed zine, more composed journal. “My favorite thing about art is this quality of progress,” he says. “The seeking and transformation that both a song or a poem can develop over its creation, but also how a body of work can create an arc.” For Bains, the work of thinking about work continues.
~ Video Premiere ~
“The Battle of Atlanta”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Hannah Hayes: It’s kind of staggering to think about all the things that have happened since “Youth Detention” came out in 2017. What is it like for you to write songs or perform them today now that so many more people are in tune with the themes and messages you've been talking about for more than a decade now?
Lee Bains: These stories are so old. They're so deep. Back into the earliest histories we have on this land, we have stories of people standing together and fighting these hierarchical systems trying to exploit or oppress or enslave. On “Old-Time Folks,” I was thinking about how to open that up, how to try to open up my understanding of time as it relates to these struggles, and also to open up in a sense of inviting both the people and peoples about whom I'm writing, but also anybody who cares to listen in, to this history as it's existed and as it is existing and as it's being created.
In “Youth Detention,” I wanted to look at how systems manifest themselves and whether those are political systems or whether those are belief structures and how they manifest themselves in personal lives. It's just the stuff I think about, and writing is a way for me to work out my thoughts or my beliefs or ideas. As I was in the stage of moving toward writing “Old-Time Folks,” I was dealing with these points of despair, feelings of futility, feelings of being powerless or disempowered. So were a lot of my friends or other people that I knew involved in organizing or art or activism. I started considering how art can affect that. I started thinking about art that, instead of leading me into this place of feeling overwhelmed, despairing, whatever, led me to a place of feeling capable, together; a sense of belonging, community; a sense of hope. Things that would, at least for me, build me up. Give me a sense of belonging to something larger than myself.
HH: It really does feel like our generation is at peak disillusionment right now. How do you prevent yourself from spiraling down that rabbit hole? I’m sure you feel a lot of pressure to stay motivated because you’re a person whose work is meant to rally people with you, but you struggle with these feelings like everyone else, too.
LB: Oh, yeah. Big time. That's a lot of what drove me to write this record in the way I did, because I definitely struggle with feelings of despair that everything's getting worse and not better. There's no hope. That we, whoever we are, are alone, and I'm alone. I think our media and a lot of pop culture feeds into those ideas. That we are at this point in history, pardon my French, just fucked. And it's never been this bad before. One thing that helps me is to look back through time and see that's objectively not true. Things have been way more fucked than they are right now. They've always been fucked in different ways. It's always taken people standing together, acting together, and struggling to get the ball down the field.
I also just have practices and people I talk to who help with all this. Community is a huge part of that, and remembering … that we’re a point on the timeline. We aren't it. We have people who came before us who laid the groundwork, and people will keep pushing long after we're all gone. So I don't have to have all the answers today. I don't have to be 100 percent on the ball every day. There's multitudes in this thing. At my very best, I'm just one of those many multitudes, one person of them. Also, there's art I turn to. That's another thing I was thinking about when I was working on this record. What are songs or albums or books or movies or stories that get me fired up or hopeful or whatever, rather than despairing?
HH: What are some of those pieces of art that have helped you?
LB: I remember writing a list down at a certain point, just for if I'm having a hard time, that I can go back to it. The Clash, “London Calling,” is a really big one. Jefferson Airplane, “Volunteers.” Billy Bragg, “Don't Try This at Home.” The Staple Singers, “Be Altitude: Respect Yourself.” Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Exodus.” Arundhati Roy’s [novel] The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Angela Davis’ The Meaning of Freedom. The poetry of Joy Harjo and Pablo Neruda. Those are all pieces of art I'll go to as a way to reorient myself.
HH: It feels like a lot of the current language around progress or revolution has become accessible and mainstream in one sense, yet it often feels like it’s used in a walled-off way or even as a litmus test, which can exclude people with less exposure to or experience in conversations within social progress from joining in. How do you think about language specifically with your lyrics, which feel radically inclusive but also completely approachable and familiar?
LB: I just try to look to people who do that really well. When I was a teenager or in my early 20s and really starting to get into writing music, [I looked to] the songwriters in the Drive-By Truckers and Steve Earle. Then there are bands like Strike Anywhere from Richmond, Virginia. The other one's Against Me!, from Gainesville, Florida. I remember leaving their shows feeling like a different world was possible. I would feel so together with people. I remember feeling, at Truckers shows, this really intense feeling of togetherness and possibility. I think Tupac was a huge one for me, and OutKast. These were people who I think could write about really complicated social and political realities in a way that felt genuine.
The way we talk to each other is just so important. I've had conversations with people who often would agree with one another but don’t, because of the specific etiquettes around language, or just different vocabularies and the way that’s used by powerful systems. I think media really has a field day with this stuff. They'll find a word they can almost give a new sense of meaning to, and it becomes a weapon or a bumper sticker. Language is so powerful. Its power can be to create these flashpoints or to make connections where they otherwise may be difficult to make. I think those are my favorite writers, regardless of form, who are able to use language in a way that can bring together understanding.
Something I'm thinking a lot about now is the word liberty. What does it mean? In 2022, when I hear somebody say liberty, my hackles go up a little bit. You know what I mean? But when I read the definition of it, I'm like, of course, I'm in favor of liberty. Who isn't in favor of liberty? That's what's so amazing about literature. One word can mean fucking a hundred different things. That's why poetry does what it does. That's why prophecy does what it does. A single word is so rich. Or it can be if we allow it to be.
HH: “The Battle of Atlanta” has some heavy historical weight to use for the title of this song. Did the Cyclorama at the Atlanta History Center have anything to do with your image layering in this song and the video?
LB: I am fascinated by the Cyclorama. There's actually an insert in the album that’s like a people's Cyclorama kind of thing. But the museum I talk about in the song is actually the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. It's weird growing up in Birmingham. [The Cyclorama] was built after the Civil War. Even though there was plenty of Confederate Lost Cause ideology around, plenty of rebel flags, you weren't in a place that was directly marked by these battles. There are a lot of things weird to me about Atlanta, but one thing that was really strange about it, to me, is how there'd be a Confederate Avenue or these markers everywhere about how so-and-so's division launched an attack on so-and-so at this intersection. Walking around in the city, there’s a sense of a very real battle being fought here. Singing about that in terms of all the different battles that have happened in Atlanta and are being fought in Atlanta right now, that aren't memorialized, I was wondering why aren’t these given so much space to memory? Why is the one battle being honored here the one that was fighting for the enslavement of Black people?
All these other battles that have unfolded or are unfolding in Atlanta are in the interest of the people of Atlanta, which you don't see memorials for all over town. I mention in the song the Washerwomen Strike, or the Summerhill [Riot]. You can go online and see photos of folks in Atlanta protesting racist police violence in Summerhill in the early 1960s and destroying cop cars, just like the people were doing in 2020. But there's no Cyclorama for the Summerhill uprising. There's no markers up and down Memorial Drive for the Atlanta Washerwomen Strike. Those struggles really were for the benefit of Atlanta and working Georgians.
HH: In the song you talk about Atlanta’s current gentrification and the “blur of condos.” Could you expand on how you see that meshing with this historical perspective?
LB: There is a Battle of Atlanta, and there always has been. There's always been, back to the very earliest days of the Muscogee Creek [village] of Pakanahuili, up through the enslavement of African Americans, up through the exploitation of poor white and Black labor and sharecropping systems and mills. There's always been a battle against the people here, and there's been these hierarchical systems that try to support themselves on the backs of working people and people who were rooted here. This was an attempt to pay honor to those battles, where there were folks, and there are folks, arming themselves and standing together for the benefit of the many as opposed to the benefit of the few. Right now, that is largely centering on, at least in the circles I'm hearing about, housing and policing and education. These are ways in which longstanding Atlanta residents, most of whom are Black, most of whom are working class, are being pinched out of housing, security, and education.
What I'm seeing in gentrification is just a product of turning housing into a commodity. A group of 20 people in Germany or Australia invest their money in property, but they aren't living in these houses. They're not buying these houses for their grandma. This is turning something that we all need to survive, that we all need to thrive and live in the world, into baseball cards that can be traded for higher and higher value amongst themselves, while people need places to sleep. People need places to raise their kids. To me, these problems just come back to these systems hiding in plain sight.
HH: You’re going to be on tour with Loamlands as your band now. What do you think the live shows will be like with them?
LB: I’m excited about it. I’m going to go practice with them for the first time soon. We've played with Loamlands a good bit. I love them. I'd heard the record that they're presently working on. Then I played with them on a tour I did in April. I was just like, man, I think this band would really play this record in particular really well, because they're so dynamic. I'm excited to be able to get to some of those more tender moments on the record. But they can also get raucous when we need to. I'm usually pretty prone to worry about stuff. I just really haven't been worried about it. It'll be really cool because they're just so great.
Hannah Hayes is Deputy Editor and Producer at The Bitter Southerner. Previously, she was a lead editor at Wildsam Field Guides, where she produced 10 books about American cities, regions, and road trips and, prior to that, was Travel + Culture Editor at Southern Living. She lives in New Orleans.
