Folk-punk and the role of the narrative song is something I want to think through carefully.

The tradition goes back to the broadside ballad — songs that tell specific stories about specific people and events, songs that function as journalism as much as art. Dylan is the obvious modernizer of this tradition, but folk-punk has kept it alive in ways that mainstream folk has largely abandoned.

The best folk-punk narrative songs are specific to the point of discomfort. They name places, name people, name the material details of working-class and marginalized life in ways that more polished folk music abstracts away. This specificity is doing real political work — it's making visible things that middle-class musical culture tends to render invisible.

The thing that separates great folk-punk narrative songs from merely competent ones is whether the story is in service of a larger argument or whether it stands alone. The best ones do both.