Mass shootings in California this past week left eleven people dead at a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterrey Park and seven people dead during a workplace shooting spree in Half Moon Bay. According to the Washington Post, as of last Tuesday, 70 people have been killed and 167 people injured in the United States this year in mass shootings, defined as incidents when at least four people have either been killed or wounded by gunfire.
Unlike in the past, the nation’s reaction to these shootings was rather muted. There are probably multiple reasons for that, but one of them I suspect is that most Americans have concluded the politics of gun reform in this country have ossified and there’s not much people can say or do to change that. Perhaps it’s time then, for both philosophical and practical reasons, to shake things up by taking on what has become perhaps the biggest obstacle to gun reform in the United States: The Second Amendment itself. It’s time to repeal it.
Many on the left will instinctively react to my proposal by claiming it’s far too bold and likely to alienate people open to more incremental reforms. Furthermore, sensing that they have the political momentum on their side, some gun control advocates will insist on a slower, steadier approach that won’t unnerve middle-of-the-road voters. Last year, after all, following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Congress passed the nation’s first significant gun control legislation in over twenty-five years. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provides billions of dollars for school mental health programs, subjects those under the age of 21 to enhanced background checks, and sets aside $750 million to help states implement red flag laws that would prevent those a court has deemed a risk to themselves or others from obtaining guns. It also closes the “boyfriend loophole” so that those convicted of domestic violence while in a dating relationship can’t purchase guns, clarifies the definition of “federally licensed firearm dealer,” and prohibits people from purchasing firearms for people who are themselves prohibited from purchasing guns.
Yet calling such legislation “significant” is probably overstating the case. The financial support for red flag laws is likely the biggest deal, but it would only apply to the nineteen states that currently have red flag laws and to individuals who had already been flagged by the legal system. Additional funding for school mental health programs is always welcome but doesn’t get at the root of much gun violence in the United States. If there’s a concern about gun violence in the United States, these are baby steps.
But baby steps are still steps and proof to many it is actually possible for Congress to legislate in the area of gun control. Yet this was as far as 15 Republican senators and 14 Republican members of the House were willing to go on the matter. (Recall that squabbles over simply closing the boyfriend loophole nearly derailed negotiations.) Anything more substantive doesn’t seem in the offing. Republican Senator John Cornyn, who helped negotiate last summer’s bill, confirmed as much last week when he said, “I think we did everything we could do with the votes available last summer, so I don’t see [any new gun legislation] happening anytime soon.”
Of even greater concern to me, however, was what the Supreme Court did the day the House passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. On that day, the Court issued a ruling declaring unconstitutional a 111-year-old New York state law that required individuals to prove a special need beyond a generalized desire for self-defense to qualify for a concealed carry permit. The Court’s conservative majority ruled the state couldn’t make a citizen prove he or she needed to exercise a constitutional right—in this case, the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms—before allowing the citizen to exercise that right. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen
The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right,’ subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees. We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.
In other words, you feel like packing heat, just pack the heat.
Now it should be said Justice Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence joined by Chief Justice Roberts clarifying that background checks and prohibitions against carrying firearms in sensitive public spaces were still constitutional, so it appears there’s a majority that would place some restrictions on who can buy and carry a gun and where they can take such weapons. But I can’t help but think this is a classic Brett-and-switch designed to make Kavanaugh appear more reasonable than he actually is. When it comes to exercising a constitutional right, what to Kavanaugh is a reasonable component of a background check? For example, should someone really be denied a constitutional right for merely verbally threatening a romantic acquaintance with harm? For getting into a physical altercation with someone over a year ago? How long should a reasonable background check take before someone can start exercising their constitutional right? I assume Kavanaugh believes the Supreme Court is a sensitive public space where people won’t be allowed to carry a concealed weapon, but what about the public place you’re gathering at this weekend? I can’t help but think that’s exactly the sort of spot Kavanaugh thinks people ought to be able to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
I must admit there’s a really clean logic to the Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol. The Bill of Rights grants Americans the right to bear arms, just as it grants Americans the right to free speech and free religion, so if the state acts in a way that curtails such a basic constitutional right, the state must clear a very high bar before doing so. In this country, the Constitution allows you to say pretty much anything you want and worship pretty much any deity you want without prior restraint or sanction after the fact. By extension, then, that same Constitution should allow you to bear arms any way you want without the state first granting you permission to do so. Has someone personally threatened your life? Do you live in a high crime neighborhood? Do you live in a neighborhood where crime might happen? Do you visit places where gun crime has happened before, like schools, malls, subways, shopping centers, and churches? Are you afraid of minorities? Do you fear the government? Do you want to send a not-so-subtle message to those you interact with not to upset or unnerve you? Such reasons are immaterial. If you want to bear arms, the Constitution says you can.
Historically, the Supreme Court hasn’t adopted that position. For most of the twentieth century, the Court left the Second Amendment alone and allowed governments to regulate firearms. When they did weigh in on gun laws, as they did in United States v. Miller (1939), the Court typically based its interpretation of the Second Amendment on its “well-regulated militia” clause. That effectively turned the Second Amendment into an anachronism, as there weren’t Revolutionary-era militias or any sort of modern-day equivalent thereof around anymore that required an armed populace to fill out its ranks (that is, unless you consider the KKK or the American Protective League I wrote about last week militias, in which case we can see how the Second Amendment could actually enable Americans to stomp all over the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.) In the early 1990s, former Chief Justice Warren Burger called efforts undertaken by the gun lobby to convince the American public that individuals had a right to own guns free of government regulation a “fraud” and did so by referring to the well-regulated militia clause. Time had rendered the Second Amendment obsolete.
(It’s probably worth revisiting the Second Amendment as a point of reference, so here it is, in all its janky glory:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
For the love of the Creator, did the Founding Fathers turn their grammar check off when they wrote the Bill of Rights? Oh, they didn’t have computers back then to catch their mistakes. Makes sense. You know what else they didn’t have back then? AR-15s.)
Anyway, in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court decided to dust off this antiquated amendment and see what damage they could do with it. Authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, Heller tossed aside a Washington, D.C., law regulating handguns and rifles in the District by concluding the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to possess a gun independent of service in a militia, and that the right to possess a gun is intimately connected to a natural right to self-defense. Heller was mainly concerned with keeping a gun in one’s home; New York State Rifle & Pistol took that right to the streets.
Heller was apparently Scalia’s pride and joy, his magnum opus, the culmination of his jurisprudence. But that’s also kind of like saying Bon Jovi’s best album is What About Now. (Scalia came from Jersey, so I assume he would have understood that quip, but just in case, let me clarify: Bon Jovi has 2-3 catchy songs but overall they suck and their worst album is What About Now.)
Heller is judicial malpractice for two big reasons. First, Scalia argues all that talk about “militias” in the Second Amendment is merely announcing a “purpose” and has no bearing on the scope of the “operative” clause concerning the “right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” In other words, Scalia—that great textualist—just wants us to ignore the first half of the Second Amendment’s text and focus on the second half. (Weird, by the way, how no other amendment is conditioned by a statement of “purpose.” It’s like the Founders thought that was important to include for some reason.) Scalia’s approach here is also strange because Scalia was an originalist who based his interpretation of the Constitution on the original understanding of constitutional provisions at the time the provisions were adopted (he spends a lot of time in Heller using historical sources from England and colonial America to explain how the Founding Fathers understood the Second Amendment) but then argues the operative clause of the Second Amendment has a life independent of the amendment’s stated purpose. He spends page after page of the opinion explaining how centuries-worth of law has crafted the Second Amendment but locates a decisive break in time in the middle of the very amendment he’s trying to decipher! Very convenient if he wants us to ignore any mention of militias.
Secondly, Scalia—again, a great textualist—goes to great lengths to connect the right to bear arms to the natural right of self-defense, but if that’s really what the right to bear arms comes down to, why didn’t the Founding Fathers just include language that explicitly made the Second Amendment about the right to self-defense? Why bring up “Arms” and a “militia” in the first place? Just cut to the chase, man! I’d argue the Founding Fathers phrased the Second Amendment the way they did not because they were focused on an individual’s right to self-defense (a given, and a right that did not necessarily depend of firearm technology but also fists, clubs, and swords as well as future non-gun technology they couldn’t yet imagine) but because they wanted to connect the possession of Arms to the needs of a militia. That seems like the most straightforward approach to me.
The effect of Heller and later New York State Rifle & Pistol was to turn a vestigial constitutional provision into a modern-day constitutional right on par with the freedoms of speech and religion. Before Heller, the Second Amendment loomed over gun legislation like a ghost, a spook that would rattle its chains whenever some new firearm regulation was debated but that never kept lawmakers from enacting such laws. Now each and every one of us has a constitutionally-protected right to keep and bear arms not only in our homes but when we’re out in public.
This newfound right not only imperils the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act but nearly every other gun regulation on the books as well as future attempts at meaningful gun reform. Again, the Court has signaled the government can place reasonable restrictions on the right to bear arms, but because we’re dealing with a fundamental constitutional right now, the Court (and especially the current Court) will likely subject such laws to strict scrutiny. That means gun regulations would be presumptively invalid unless the state can provide a compelling interest proving the necessity of the regulation and demonstrate that the law is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest in the least restrictive way possible. There’s room for interpretation there, and while I’d expect liberal and moderate jurists to defer to the state’s rationale in such cases, I worry the arch conservatives populating our judicial system would doubt the constitutionality of gun control laws such as waiting periods, prohibitions against open carry, gun-free zones, and assault weapons bans.
Let me put it this way: The right to bear arms, like the right to free speech, is not unlimited. You cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater, and you cannot open fire in a crowded theater. But I wouldn’t put it past someone like Clarence Thomas to believe that because it is conceivable someone would open fire with an automatic weapon in a crowded theater that it would be reasonable for citizens who want to bear arms for the sake of self-defense to bring an automatic weapon into a crowded theater, that the Constitution protects their right to do so, and that the state would need a more compelling interest than preventing mass shootings to prohibit the open carry of automatic weapons into such places.
All of which makes this article I just read about how Joe Biden keeps pushing for an assault weapons ban so demoralizing. Biden knows getting an assault weapons ban through Congress is a heavy lift. But even if Democrats retook the House, added seats in the Senate to make it easier to overcome the filibuster with a handful of Republican votes, and enacted popular gun control legislation, those laws would still slam hard into an obstinately pro-gun court and their cherished new right, making the survival of that assault weapons ban dependent upon what Brett Kavanaugh thinks is “reasonable.” Now maybe a switch in time will save the nine, but even after Newtown and Aurora and Charleston and Orlando and Las Vegas and Parkland and Uvalde and a shooting at a GOP congressional softball practice for God’s sake, I just don’t see a lot of movement on this issue from conservatives. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was the rare bill that actually moved gun laws in this country to the left; in the long run, though, thanks to the Supreme Court, the pro-gun camp has the momentum.
So rather than expend tremendous amounts of political energy on doomed legislative initiatives, let’s just go for the jugular: A movement to repeal and replace the Second Amendment. That’s how we get around the roadblock erected by the Supreme Court on this issue. It’s also how we can reckon with the constitutional problem posed by the Second Amendment once and for all.
Let’s state the obvious: Possessing a gun does not belong on a list of fundamental human liberties and civil rights. If we were creating a democratic republic from scratch today, we would surely affirm freedoms of speech, religion, and assembly and ensure the rights of the accused. We’d also probably include provisions guaranteeing a right to vote, a K-12 education, and freedom from identity-based discrimination. There would probably be a debate about whether people are entitled to shelter, food, clothing, and health care. But just as we wouldn’t declare a right to a phone or a computer or a car (no matter how important those things may be to a prospective right to communicate or right to move about) we wouldn’t say the citizens of that democracy, in order to live as free citizens, have a right to possess a handheld device that uses a shooting tube to launch projectiles for the purpose of self-defense. The fact such a “right” is included in the Bill of Rights is a quirk of American history rendered obsolete by the passage of time.
Most Americans also instinctively know gun possession doesn’t really rise to the level of a right even though it’s mentioned in the Bill of Rights. Rights are supposed to be lightly regulated. The government can’t presume it can regulate something protected by a right the way it can presume it can regulate something like commerce; as I mentioned earlier, when the state legislates behavior connected to a constitutional right, it falls on the state to prove it has a compelling interest to do so. But with the exception of some NRA nuts, most everybody knows guns are so dangerous they need to be regulated. There aren’t sweeping, near-universal principles underlying gun possession. When dealing with guns, it is very reasonable for society to want to determine who can keep and bear arms, what conditions they must meet before they are able to do so, what sort of arms people can possess, how those arms must be kept, how those arms can be sold, where those arms can be taken, and under what conditions those arms may actually be used. In fact, these are pretty basic questions that need to be answered before people can start exercising this supposed “right.” Because keeping and bearing arms demands regulatory oversight from the get-go, it qualifies less as a right than as an activity that policy ought to regulate.
The NRA and many pro-gun advocates would certainly oppose this framework and any attempt to repeal the Second Amendment, and would do so with a rhetoric based on fear and paranoia. For that reason, rather than simply repeal the Second Amendment and let the states rework the nation’s gun laws, the federal government should first pass a comprehensive gun regulation package that would replace the Second Amendment once enough states ratified the repeal of that amendment. The law should address the basic issues posed above: Who can own a gun, what requirements must be met to obtain a gun license, what sort of guns people can keep, under what conditions they must keep those guns, who can sell guns and how they can be sold, how guns can be transported, where guns can be taken, and under what circumstances people can use a gun. While such a law would certainly impose greater restrictions on gun possession (it would likely include an assault weapons ban and greater restrictions on handguns) the point of such a package would be to provide Americans with a reasonable, fully-realized substitute for the Second Amendment and assure them that the most draconian reforms (i.e., bans on hunting rifles) would not come to pass.
It is not easy to amend the Constitution. Doing so requires overwhelming support in both Congress and among the state legislatures. But given the direction the Court has taken Second Amendment jurisprudence, any major piece of legislation that somehow miraculously overcomes the filibuster may be doomed. And waiting for the Court’s composition to change could very well take decades. Given that timeframe, a push to repeal the Second Amendment seems less quixotic.
But even if repealing the Second Amendment seems like a far-fetched idea, it can still serve a major purpose: Convincing the American public that gun possession doesn’t rise to the level of a right. The mystique of the Second Amendment makes it hard for Americans today to really reckon with calls for gun reform. If we demystify the Second Amendment, however, we can shift the initial terms of the debate from if we can regulate guns in this country to how. That’s a huge mental hurdle to clear, and one that might hasten a shift in the way the public, policymakers, and judges think about guns in America.
Signals and Noise
Ladies and gentlemen, 23-year-old Hunter Larkin, the once-and-now-again Mayor of Goddard, Kansas (population approx. 5,400).
At the tender of age of 21, Larkin—who works as an accounting manager for a local oil field pipe manufacturer—got himself named the mayor of his small Wichita suburb. But last May, embroiled in scandal, he stepped down as mayor (while maintaining his seat on the council) and embarked on a run for the Kansas State House as a Republican. He lost. But at this past week’s council meeting, in a move that left Niccolo Machiavelli jealous and Don Trump wondering why he didn’t think of that, Larkin got two new members appointed to the council, got himself re-appointed mayor, and then immediately axed the town’s city manager, which led to the assistant manager’s resignation. “The day and age where unelected bureaucrats ran this town is over,” the syntactically-challenged Larkin proclaimed. One resident said the episode reminded him of 1935 Germany. (Larkin’s haircut did that for me.) Read all about the putsch here.
Veterans of past debt ceiling showdowns are worried this one will end in disaster, as Republican lawmakers this time around appear unwilling to yield.
By Phillip Bump of The Washington Post: “The Challenge of Cutting the Federal Budget, Visualized”
Some of the bills Kevin McCarthy promised holdouts would go straight to the floor for a vote in exchange for their support to make him Speaker may not make it there given opposition from other Republicans. Does McCarthy want to put opponents on the hook for voting no? Maybe that’s what the holdouts want. His loyalists probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he did the bidding of those who were voting against him rather than his loyalists. Or maybe McCarthy knew these loyalists’ demands were going nowhere from the start.
“Look, this is 2018. I will tell you she has matured. I think she realizes she doesn’t know everything, and she wants to learn and become I think more of a team player. I think it’s incumbent upon more senior members to try to — she’s a member of Congress — bring her in and try to educate her that these theories that she has are not accurate.”—Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), justifying Marjorie Taylor Greene’s appointment to the House Homeland Security and Oversight Committees. Pretty sure the point of those committees isn’t to “educate” wacko legislators who once claimed a plane didn’t hit the Pentagon on 9/11. Pretty sure that actually ought to disqualify someone from serving on those committees.
More on Republican lawmakers educating one another: House Republicans held a meeting this week to educate fellow members about the debt ceiling, the consequences of not raising it, and how it differs from a government shutdown. Nothing like learning on the job. But this is what you have to do when your caucus watches FOX News and doomscrolls conservative social media all day.
This guy, a.k.a “Bigo,” pictured below in Nancy Pelosi’s office
was found guilty on eight charges related to the 1/6 riot. His “others made me do it” defense didn’t seem to work out so well for him. Bigo rejected the verdict, saying it wasn’t handed down by his “peers,” but of course, his peers would never serve on a jury as they have no use for the rule of law.
Michael Continetti writes in the Washington Free Beacon that Democrats and Republicans are making the same mistakes dealing with Donald Trump as they did in 2016.
Don Trump let the world know he won his Florida club’s senior golf championship this week, which I assume means he actually lost by 74 strokes. And what do you know, he didn’t even play the first day of the tournament because he was giving a eulogy at Diamond’s funeral. Instead, he submitted a score he supposedly recorded the Thursday before, which gave him a 5-stroke lead. That’s how all golf tournaments should work: Just submit your best, unverified all-time scores.
The Guardian figured out who made a $1 million donation to the controversial Arizona election audit: Don Trump.
Republicans in New Mexico have condemned an Albuquerque man who shot up the homes of four local Democrats after losing his bid for the New Mexico State House (a result he thinks was rigged against him despite losing by 50 points.) They’re just now getting around to admitting the suspect’s seven-year prison stint for theft should have been a red flag, but don’t want the public to get hung-up on the man’s election denialism.
EmptyWheel looks at the timeline in the Biden classified documents scandal and concludes Biden’s lawyers haven’t been as straightforward as their spin makes them out to be.
By Cameron Joseph for Vice News: “The Classified Documents Scandal is Even Dumber Than You Think”
Here’s FOX News host Jesse Waters wishing Mike Pence would just commit a felony already:
Beware the whiplash:
Moving on from keeping secret documents to destroying public records: Republicans in the Arizona legislature have approved a rule that allows lawmakers to delete emails after 90 days and texts as soon as they are received.
The Week in the Life of George Santos
Santos admitted this week that he did not in fact loan his campaign $500,000, which raises the obvious question: Where, then, did that cool half mil come from?
That question gets a lot more interesting after a report by Noah Lanard and David Corn of Mother Jones found that many of the donors on Santos’ finance reports either don’t exist or revealed they didn’t actually donate money to his campaign.
Santos’ campaign paid Republican tech firm WinRed $206,000 to process donations to his campaign, which represents a 3.94% processing fee. But if he paid $206,000 to WinRed, where’s the $5.2 million he would have had to raise to incur that fee?
Amazingly, Santos’ campaign reported 40 expenses of $199.99, which is one penny shy of the federal requirement to turn in a receipt. Ninety percent of all congressional campaigns did not record a single expense valued at between $199.00 and $199.99. Some of the places Santos spent $199.99 include places that would charge way more than that for their services (i.e., Miami hotels.)
The new campaign treasurer listed by Santos on his campaign documents told reporters he does not in fact work for Santos’ campaign.
Yet Kevin McCarthy has confirmed Republicans won’t kick him out of the House unless Santos is found breaking a law. You can apparently lie to voters about everything under the sun and still remain a member of the House Republican caucus in good standing. (Late breaking: DOJ told the FEC to stand down its prosecution of Santos because they want first crack at him.)
Wisconsin, the most evenly-divided and polarized state in the nation, will hold an election in about two months to determine control of an evenly-divided State Supreme Court, which could decide the future of abortion and gerrymandering (among other things) in the state.
By Perry Bacon Jr. of the Washington Post: “The Police Killing in Memphis is a Reminder We Must Change Policing”
States under GOP control are considering a wave of bills aimed at regulating the lives of transgender kids.
In news that will upset environmentalists but be completely ignored by Republicans, the Biden administration has approved more drilling permits on federal lands than the Trump administration through this point in their presidencies.
Legislation signed into law by President Biden last year aims to put high-tech jobs for people without college degrees in populist, working-class areas of the country that voted for Trump. Will that move bring some of those voters back to the Democratic camp?
Asawin Suebaeng and Patrick Reis of Rolling Stone review Trump’s rush to execute federal prisoners during his final six months as president. Since 1963 and before 2020, the federal government has executed three people; in the last six months of Trump’s term, the federal government executed thirteen people. One of those executed was Brandon Bernard, who had participated in a double homicide at the age of 18; executed at the age of forty, Bernard had grown from an immature teenager into a responsible adult who mentored at-risk teenagers.
Although we’re not out of the woods yet, the “tripledemic” wave of COVID, flu, and RSV that many epidemiologists predicted would hit us this winter has fortunately not materialized.
The U.S. economy grew 2.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Over the past six months, wage gains in the U.S. have outpaced inflation.
Russia’s invasion of Europe has upended energy markets in a way that has backfired on Putin but not without economic pain in Europe.
Mikhail Zygar writes in the New York Times that it’s time to consider Yevgeny Prigozhin—founder of the Wagner Group, the private Russian army that fights alongside Russian troops in Ukraine and Syria—the heir apparent to (and potential rival of) Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin’s rise to prominence within the Kremlin over the past year has been notable, and his barbarity (the Wagner Group released a video last fall showing them executing a Russian deserter with a sledgehammer; “Wagner sledgehammers” are now sold in Russia as souvenirs) has endeared him to Russians who think Russia’s going too soft on Ukraine.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Strays by Margo Price
Nashville has never shied away from chronicling the travails of poor and working-class Americans. These songs follow no set formula, but very often they feature salt-of-the-earth types who have learned to embrace their lot in life while sometimes raising a middle finger toward all those uppity folk who look down upon them. Frequently, the characters insist their struggles have made them stronger. If someone’s had it really bad, they become an object of pity or even an object lesson. Unless you’ve walked too far from the line, the underlying promise is there’s always something, someplace, someone, some way of life you can return to. There is redemption and rebirth in the return. Take me home, country roads.
Margo Price, however, has never quite felt at home in Nashville, in part because her music pushes against Nashville’s narrative tropes. Yes, her songs are about survivors, but, to borrow a line from Bruce Springsteen, they’re about survivors who “wind up wounded, not even dead.” Her characters get pushed around by life and barely scrape by, every day leaving them more and more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economy. As things get worse, they struggle to escape the bad relationships and bad habits that have trapped them there. Home may not be a refuge. Home may not even want them. And wherever her characters flee to, they’re on their own or in the company of those who would exploit or abuse them.
Strays is the title of Price’s latest album, and it’s an apt description of not only the people she sings about but also herself. The rural small town universe of country music is not romanticized in her work. Instead, it’s the source of her alienation. In a world that celebrates toughness and fortitude, she recognizes that everyone isn’t built strong enough to survive (as she sings on “Anytime You Call”, “We’re not as stable as we seem,”) that hard life lessons can leave people seriously hurt and in need of help, and that suffering can break rather than build someone’s character. (Again, from “Anytime You Call”: “One small gust of wind could knock down every dream.”) It’s one thing to be a country rebel but it’s an entirely different thing to be that person—check, that woman—who doesn’t fit into the universe the country rebels have created for themselves. “I think the whole world’s going crazy,” Price sings on “Radio”, a song featuring indie musician Sharon Van Etten, before adding, “And it makes us look insane.”
That’s a sentiment someone like Ken Kesey could have gotten behind, which is fitting since Price has soaked this album in the sounds of psychedelic rock. (She’s confessed to using hallucinogenic mushrooms before heading into the studio to work on this record.) That influence is most apparent on the standout opening track “Been to the Mountain” (with its fuzzed out electric guitar) and “Change of Heart” (which borrows an organ sound from the intersection of Jefferson Airplane and Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd.)
But you can also hear it in the playfulness of those songs’ lyrics. “Been to the Mountain” channels Bob Dylan’s wordplay and late-career boastfulness (“I got a myth in my pocket, got a bullet in my teeth/ I’m goin’ straight in the fire, I’m gonna talk to the high priest”) and even drops in a “babe” before plummeting into a bad trip (“Do you ever walk down the street and do you think to yourself/ ‘Am I bein’ watched, man? Am I on the list?’”). “Change of Heart” is a tangle of juxtapositions: “Well, if you break both your legs, oh, don’t come runnin’ to me” and “Way down deep, you’re just as shallow as me.”
Price contains multitudes. Where she comes from, that suggests Price is suffering from a disorder.
The psychedelic influences are merely a gateway to an album steeped in classic rock. The acoustic guitar on “Light Me Up” could have been lifted from a Led Zeppelin album. (The song even features a breaking levee.) The guitar chords on “Change of Heart” ring out as though they were strummed by a band of Heartbreakers, while the chord changes on “Radio” recall George Harrison. The reference to Ontario on “Country Road” should tip you off that it’s really a Neil Young homage. “Hell in the Heartland” is what Fleetwood Mac would have sounded like if they had come from rural Illinois. Price’s turn to rock influences may surprise those who remember her from her 2016 debut country folk album Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, which earned the then-33-year-old a Best New Artist nomination at the Grammy Awards. Yet her music has always been as indebted to Tom Petty as it has been to Willie Nelson.
It’s easy to listen to Strays and get lost in the haze of its late-60s/early-70s influences. “Lydia”, the album’s penultimate track, is a reality check, however. (See Exit Music.) It’s already being talked about as one of the year’s best songs. A six-minute, string-laden acoustic track set outside a (methadone? abortion?) clinic, “Lydia” is a prose poem with no rhyme scheme about a “white trash, trailer trash” woman at the end of her rope. Lydia is at the mercy of America’s capitalist system and the cycle of poverty. (The details are poignant; a broken car eats up time and money she doesn’t have.) She watches as sex and drugs ruin the lives of those around her. The institutions that are supposed to be there to give her a boost—schools, health care systems—let her down. So has God. At two points in the song she sings “Bless this mess,” turning the trite phrase into a punchline only those who have the means to clean up their messes can laugh at. Lydia isn’t just staring into the abyss; she’s peering deep into the future. “You’ve got…a long life to live with yourself,” she sings, a stray lost in the middle of twenty-first century America.