The Occupy Movement has been something of great interest for many musicians who may or may not take on politics in their songs. Kevin Devine recently wrote up an article filled with his feelings on the movement and how politics can play into his music at times. You can check out the full article here and a snippet of it below by clicking “Read More”.

From our little corner of the playground, I’ve always felt mildly uncomfortable with the amount of attention paid to my ten or twelve expressly “political” songs.

It’s not because I don’t stand by their content (I do); I just have a hard time framing“cataloguing one person’s filtration of existence and its chaos and its systems and its power relationships” as anything approaching activism. I cringe a bit when someone else tries to frame it that way for me, because I’ve been around what I consider to be real and engaged activism, and I think it looks different than songwriting.

I’ve never seen myself as especially topical in the way a Pete Seeger or Phil Ochswas. I feel more like I write and I sing about my experience. Sometimes, that means writing inwardly, abstractions about a thought process, a person, a memory, a feeling, a moment; other times, it means being more specific, flipping the lens, observing, reacting. Sometimes, what you see provokes your conscience, and you respond accordingly.

I guess I just feel like that’s a prerogative and not a requirement.

I write about life: Love, faith, sex, drugs, family, people, feelings, dreams, fictions, memories, and, sometimes, “politics.”

For me, it’s all part of the same larger thematic picture; it doesn’t feel like a writing exercise or even a choice to talk about war or income inequality or global warming or the failures of crony capitalism or our broken two-party corporatocracy or whatever. It’s just what comes out sometimes, and when it does, through me, for whatever reason, I don’t think it makes for especially clear-cut protest music so much as a knotted attempt to sort some shit out in public.