Essential Worker is wild, chaotic, filled with energy and these stop-and-go bridges in between long lines of verse. It’s August 2020 when I started writing it and cities were burning from protests about the murder of George Floyd. Black Lives Matter was being taunted by the President and Portland, Oregon was the scene of chaos and truth. I wanted something that mashed up the elements, the verses, the vocals, like streaks of tear gas. The song spurts and starts, it’s acoustic rave, it’s wild and filled with summer pandemic life and bizarre scenes immediately recognized. It’s also a modern recruitment song. Listen to the song on Bandcamp — scroll to track 5:
There is a narrative here and a progression starting with two stanzas defining Essential Workers who then go on to become the Nightly Protesters who give rise to the Essential Angels who tell us what has just happened in this world: we can't be the same society anymore. People may be essential but that doesn't mean their lives are free. Essential Worker says treat all people as equal, not just essential in times of need.
I gave this great big clump of stuff and emotion and smokey vocals to Producer Jon Ireson while California was literally burning in mid-August. The Hennessey fire started a few miles from my house and I was on edge. The first drafts were shockingly rough, as I had all these bridges and choruses, twice as many as in the final track. I worried that I was going to scare this Producer away.
So I gave Jon a much trimmer second draft, after re-recording the bridges and then went after Chana and Mikaela. We did a long Zoom recording session as I watched them record in their home while I directed remotely. Half the time was spent trying to get the audio working. I sent yet another clump of vocals, 10-12 tracks of different stuff back to Jon, half of it out of tune because our voices and throats were so hoarse from the fires and smoke taking place. The song was literally a riot of tracks, voices, beats, and smoky verse.
Jon is amazing, he is the Producer, the bass player, the organ player, percussion programming, and ultimately mix and master. We spoke several times about impact, beat, messaging, politics, and how to propel it coherently with that beat, with all the emotional draping yet still be a song. He did it. It's high energy and its high impact with some pretty direct lyrics. I wanted something the UPS delivery guys could play loud in their brown vans as the delivered goods and supplies to our sheltered society. Jon helped me do it.
The cover image of myself with a home-made mask is from 2017 during the Atlas Peak fire in Napa that burned the top of the mountains in every direction. We applied some color filtering to make it even more alarming. It’s hard to do these songs of social discord, and ultimately, they never sell or never become popular. Ultimately, few people want to hear how messed-up the world is. And they certainly don’t want to listen to wild music that sounds like a street fight. But it should easily return you to August 2020 quite quickly.
Jon Ireson, Producer says: “Patrick approached me with the idea to honor and celebrate the heroes of this year 2020 in the form of a tribute to the essential worker. Health care and essential business workers but also protesters who have to continue to hold lawmakers accountable in these times as much as any other. My mother was a nurse and though all of us should appreciate their hard work and sacrifice, it hits home for me especially. He brought a demo to me with a propulsive beat and gruff chords that he framed as a sort of battle chant to those going into harms way every day for us. With the help of his singers Chana and Mikaela, we worked to make it a soulful ode to the backbone of America. I gave the drums some rumble, gave it a marching bass line, and added some organ which to give an 'after midnight on the streets' vibe to the last verse.”
Essential Worker by Patrick Ames © 2020 All rights reserved.
1.
I am an essential worker / I make deliveries
Virus waves have wiped this place / I travel empty streets
We know we are disposible / but essential people must eat
Everyone has gone inside / to wait for their deliveries
2.
I am a health worker / I work within the quarantines
My face has sores from masks I've worn / my body needs sanitizing
Bankers, tailors, liars, and thieves / they're all the same to me
Once inside they stabilize, another day, another week
[bridge 1 ]
I'm an essential worker / I'm essential but I'm not free
I'm an virus worker / I'm essential to this society
3.
We are the nightly protesters/ we shout against the po-po-lice
We try to push the hate inside / that jacks this democracy
We are the essential angels / who sing "The world has changed.
Tear gas kings and virus queens, it's never going to be the same."
[bridge 2 ]
We deliver this protest to you, hark the angels' truth
We deliver this protest to you, hark the angels' news
[outro]
We are essential workers (we're essential, too)
We are the nightly protesters (we're essential, too)
We are essential workers but are lives ain't free.