We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.

For nearly three decades, Boston’s Dropkick Murphys have brought a rowdy, beery, joyously disreputable form of Celtic punk to the masses. When they arrived on the national scene in the late ’90s, the Murphys were one of many extremely fun niche bands on Rancid’s Hellcat imprint. But the Murphys toured hard and made irresistible ragers, and they eventually transcended their background, finding their way to audiences far outside their subculture. In 2005, for instance, they set some unused archival Woody Guthrie words to stomping, ominous, irresistible music. A year later, Martin Scorsese used “I’m Shipping Up To Boston,” the resulting song, in a couple of his scenes from his Oscar-winning Boston crime epic The Departed. The song became a legitimate hit and then a cultural staple, and it helped turn the Dropkick Murphys into an institution.

All of the members of the Dropkick Murphys have been in the band for many years, but only one person has been a Murphy for the group’s entire existence. That’s Ken Casey, who started out as the bassist and took over as one of two lead singers when original Murphy bellower Mike McColgan quit the band in 1998. These days, Casey is the face and the prime driving force of the Dropkick Murphys, and he’s also their only lead singer. (Al Barr, who shared vocal duties with Casey until recently, is on an extended break from the band, though he appears on one song from their new LP.) Casey has used his visibility to advance a number of humanitarian causes. Recently, for instance, Casey took part in an aid trip to Ukraine, and the Murphys played a rally for workers’ and veterans’ rights on the National Mall.

This week, Dropkick Murphys release their new album For The People, a return to form of sorts. Their last two LPs, 2022’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists and 2023’s Okemah Rising, were acoustic records, recorded in Woody Guthrie’s hometown and using his unpublished lyrics — extensions of the band’s longtime relationship with Guthrie’s estate and legacy. With For The People, they return to the loud, fiery shout-alongs that brought them to the dance in the first place. In a recent phone call, Casey spoke warmly and garrulously about the new album, singing with the late Shane MacGowan, The Departed, and lots of other things. I’m delighted to report that his Boston accent is just as thick on the phone as it is on record and that he starts conversations by asking, “How the hell are ya?”

For The People (2025)

It was cool to see you go on the Woody Guthrie journey with the last two records, but it’s great to hear you back in fighting form, making these fired-up songs again. Was that the idea?

KEN CASEY: We kind of had the feeling that the acoustic albums would make us want to bounce back with something more aggressive. It was just a natural occurrence, I think.

You’ve got Billy Bragg on this record, and you played with him at Newport last year.

KEN CASEY: We met the year before last. We’ve used Billy’s song “There Is Power In A Union” for decades before we go onstage. So as a surprise, we had him come to Boston and open one of our St. Patrick’s Day weekend shows. So instead of that song, which the fans are accustomed to hearing, all of a sudden, Billy was out there playing it live. Then when he finished the song, we came out and kicked into one of our own songs that he joined us for. And we just hit it off with him, man. 
We had actually, believe it or not, never crossed paths in person before that.

When you’re there backstage at one of our hometown shows and our parents and our kids are there, just to see how he interacted with our families, we knew that this guy was one of us and we would be friends forever. Not long after that, we did the tribute together at Carnegie Hall for Shane McGowan and Sinéad O’Connor, so that was another time getting to spend time with him within a few short weeks. We knew we needed to have Billy on the next album.

You guys seem like real spiritual comrades.

KEN CASEY: Yeah, definitely. Maybe it’s different musically in a lot of ways, but I think we come from that Woody Guthrie-inspired mindset.

You’ve also got a song about Fletcher Dragge from Pennywise on there. Does he know about that yet?

KEN CASEY: Yeah, I had to send it to him. He was roaring laughing.
 He just kept texting days afterwards. He’s just such a cat. We go way back with him, from ’90s Warped Tours to spending a lot of time with Pennywise on the road in the last few years. I’m just like, “How does this fucking guy not have a song?” He’s got so many stories. We’ve witnessed many of the stories. But for every crazy thing he does, he does fucking really nice things for people, too. We just thought it would be a fun thing to do, to acknowledge him.

The album ends with a song for Shane McGowan, who you worked with. 
It seems like the Pogues are a real inspiration point for your band, going all the way back.

KEN CASEY: That’s written from my own perspective, of the influence on my life — from first hearing the Pogues in my mid-teens and feeling like, OK, I’m not crazy in the fact that I like punk music and go to punk shows but come from this world in Boston, where Irish music was so prevalent because everyone’s parents or grandparents are from Ireland. Talk about feeling like someone spoke to you, you know? To go from that huge influence on my personal journey of music, just as a listener, to then starting a band in a similar vein and getting to record with Shane and tour with Shane — it just seemed like he was too impactful of a human being to not write a song about.

“Good Rats (Feat. Shane MacGowan) (2001)

When MacGowan showed up on “Good Rats,” I don’t know how much recording he was doing at that point in his life, but he sounds so crazy on that song. It’s cool hearing him captured in that zone where he’s really just scraggly yelling. What was that like?

KEN CASEY: Believe it or not, you can go on YouTube, and there’s a clip of him in the studio recording it. I had to stand in front of the microphone and snatch the cigarette out of his mouth when his lines would come because it would have just fallen on the floor. Our manager at the time was filming it. Darren had this little pompadour and the slightest resemblance to Bruce Springsteen — I mean slight. The whole recording session, Shane kept looking at Darren and going, “Bruce, are you on this track?” At first, I’m like, “What is he talking about?” And he really thought it was Bruce!

The night that Shane died, I got a text from Bruce at about 11 o’clock at night. I don’t often get texts from Bruce, period, but when I do, it’s certainly not at 11 o’clock at night. He said, you know, “I’m up having a few Guinnesses, just thinking about Shane.” He literally seemed upset, like we were. I told Bruce that story. I had never told him that story about how Shane thought Bruce was in the studio. I said to Bruce, I often wonder, when the song came out, if he said, “Well, what happened to Bruce? 
Why didn’t they use Bruce’s voice on the song, too?” Shane was actually on tour with the Popes when he sang with us, but it was a day off for him, and I think he was enjoying his day off.

How does it feel, you being the person who Bruce Springsteen thinks of when Shane McGowan passes?

KEN CASEY: I’ll take that honor. Many might disagree, but I’d like to think that we’re trying to carry on that spirit and legacy that that the Pogues brought, melding Old World and New World, telling stories about ancestors or relatives or experiences. I’ll take that any day. But then again, I don’t know how many other guys in Irish punk bands Bruce has in his Rolodex.

Recording With Rancid’s Lars Fredricksen (1998)

You guys signed to Hellcat early on, and Lars from Rancid produced the first two albums. Lars must have been like 25 when he started working with you. What was that like, when that moment happened and you got pulled into that world?

KEN CASEY: Meeting Lars for the first time was very similar to how I felt with Billy, even though it was decades apart. You know when you’re gonna click with someone right off the rip. Lars came out and slept on our couch — no air about him. He just was the guy that he portrayed himself to be, and put his heart and soul into working with us. Guys were still trying to hang on to their jobs, and that’s a tough time for a band — when you’re still working and trying to keep a bit of your old life but now you’re signed to a record company and you’ve got to drop everything and make a record. It’s like, ah, fuck. So we really needed Lars to come out and kick us in the ass, so to speak — like, “Guys, this is your life now.”

It was cool ’cause he’d had some experience, yet it was new to him in a way, too. It wasn’t like he was some fucking old producer. He had produced the Swingin’ Utters’ The Streets Of San Francisco, which is one of my favorite all-time albums, so I was sold just on that. He still had that excitement to him, and it was an energy to working together that was that was special.

That was a crazy time for Rancid.
 You guys were still playing clubs when the Rancid, Green Day, Offspring thing happened. That must have felt pretty far removed from what you were doing.

KEN CASEY: Oh yeah. 
I always say the key to success is low expectations, and our expectations literally could not have been lower. We wanted to put out a few singles and open for some bands we liked at the Rat, which was the Boston version of CBGB. Next thing you know — I credit the Boston punk scene for this all the time. The mid-’90s Boston punk scene was massive. We got to the point where we had this big following in Boston, which gave us the ability to put on a local show and do, like, an eight-band all-ages matinee and maybe have one other local band and then six other bands — a band from DC, a band from Pittsburgh, a band from New York City. They all come up here and have a great show playing to 700 kids. There was this pride in your own city’s punk scene. The other bands would go back to their cities and say, “We went and played with this band in Boston, Dropkick Murphys. They had a huge following, and we got treated great.” New York City was a little different, but a lot of these other cities had that attitude of “I want our show in our city to be as good as the Boston show.” 


The Departed (2006)

When “I’m Shipping Up Boston” was in The Departed, I wrote about how cool it is that Martin Scorsese knows who the Dropkick Murphys are and how the song goes so perfectly in this movie — a band that had been around for a long time, and this song that was already great, getting this moment.

KEN CASEY: It was funny. When this movie was being filmed here, I had local friends that were working on the movie or had little bit roles in it. They’d all say, “I talked to Marty. I’m going to get your music in the movie.” And I’d be like, “Yeah, that’s bullshit.” It wrapped, and we never heard from anybody. We were like, “God, I guess we didn’t get in the movie.” After they were gone and they had probably done their final edit and whatnot, we get the call: “We want to use your song twice in the movie,” “We want to use it in the trailer,” this and that. It was like, “Yo, great!” My friends, multiple people, were all taking credit. Then years later, I read an interview with Robbie Robertson where he was talking about how he brought the song to Scorsese, and I was like, “Oh, those friends of mine were all full of shit!”

At that point, we were touring the world, and we had a great following. But if there’s ways that you can expand your fanbase for a punk band, you don’t wanna necessarily be a fucking radio band. So what other ways are there to expand fanbase? And it’s like, well, how about you get in an Oscar-winning movie about your hometown, made by your favorite director? I’ll take that!

Truth be told, people say, “Well, shows must have got bigger.” They really didn’t in big cities. But I’ll just make up an example. Touring in the Midwest, we would have gone to Chicago, Minneapolis, and then dropped out and gone someplace else, to Denver or something. Now, we were playing, like, Fargo, North Dakota. It opened us up to some new markets that we didn’t used to go to. It made the smaller markets doable, if that makes any sense.

When you first saw the movie, did you get a goosebump moment when you heard the song?

KEN CASEY: I did, and typically I try to stay very grounded about anything that happens with the band — to say, “OK, well, that was cool,” but take it all with a grain of salt. But the first time I saw the movie, it was the local premiere in Boston, so it was a cool atmosphere because it was people I knew that all had the small roles. So many times, someone’s face would come on, and everybody started cheering. So when the song came on, the whole place went crazy. They knew us, you know what I mean?

I was like, “Wow, it’s loud and prominent.” I remember one time, we were on The Sopranos. I knew we were going to be on the episode, and I’m watching the show. All of a sudden, my phone rings, and my buddy is like, “Oh, that was great. Did you hear?” And I was like, “What?” I didn’t even hear it. They still had to license a song, and we were told we were in the episode, but it was just background music in a bar. You never know how a song’s going to be used in the scene. But [in The Departed], it was in the opening credits, and it was just really loud, especially in the theater. That actually plays a big role in how impactful a song is. It’s in your face, up front.

Did you ever talk to Scorsese about it?

KEN CASEY: No, but we shot a video that was our own little version of The Departed — running around on the waterfront, kind of a crime thing, cops chasing us. The video director Mark Higgins, who’s a friend of ours, sent it to Scorsese, and the office replied back, “Marty loves the video, but he would like to send you some movie footage to cut in.” If you have a song in a movie and you want to use movie footage, you usually have to pay big money to use that. Our buddy is editing the that video on his bedroom, and a package comes to his house from Scorsese’s office, and it’s raw footage of the movie. This is kind of unheard of, so we made a second version that actually cut in the movie footage.

A Working Man (2025)

You’ve been on a lot of soundtracks. I just saw A Working Man and “The Boys Are Back” is in that. It’s like a a signal to the audience, when your music comes in, that Jason Statham’s about to beat a bunch of people’s ass.

KEN CASEY: We sold our catalog, like a lot of people, to survive the pandemic. They’re still supposed to tell us and get anything approved before they use it, and I guess they maybe assumed that we wouldn’t have a problem with being in a Jason Statham movie, which I didn’t.
 I was actually with my son, seeing that movie, no clue. When the friggin’ song comes on, I’m like, “What the hell?”
 My instinct is always, like, “Hey, wait, no one called us or paid us for that!” And then I’m like, “Oh shit, we don’t own that anymore.”

The Red Sox Using “Tessie” As The Theme For Their Winning Season (2004)

When The Departed happened, that was the second time that you broke a curse. Scorsese finally got his Oscar, and the Red Sox finally won the World Series. That must have been a surreal experience, “Tessie” and everything surrounding it.

KEN CASEY: Yeah, obviously the backstory of that is that the Red Sox hadn’t won in 86 years.
They dug up an old song that the fanbase called the Royal Rooters used to sing, who were mostly Irish immigrants. Honey Fitz, who was JFK’s grandfather and also the mayor of Boston, he was one of them. John L. Sullivan, the bareknuckle boxing heavyweight champion, was one of them, and this guy Nuf Ced McGreevy. There was this whole crew, and I’m told that’s where the word fanatic came from. They were such diehard fans, and they would basically shit on the other team and sing this song “Tessie” but change the words to make fun of, like, the pitcher.

The Red Sox said, “Hey, we think that this might be what’s missing, and that’s what we need to break the curse.”
 So when we did a modern-day version of the song, we debuted it July 24 at Fenway before a Yankees/Red Sox game. The day before, I did an interview in the paper and declared that I guarantee the World Series from the use of the song. I was obviously just talking shit. I don’t even think I believed it. I just figured it would make for a good interview. Here we are, guaranteeing a World Series. It was something like, I don’t know, they’re down like 10 to 1, and I’m like, “Oh man, it’s over before it started.” But that was the game where A-Rod and Jason Varitek had a fight. It was a bench-clearing brawl. Pedro [Martinez] threw Don Zimmer on the ground, and the Red Sox came back, and Bill Mueller hit a walk-off home run to win it.

We went on to play a bunch of the games before the playoffs, the World Series games. They won the World Series, and the Red Sox credited the song. It was funny, though. Everyone was taking credit in Boston: “I wore this red sweater at every game!” We weren’t the only ones taking credit, but we were the only ones the Red Sox actually acknowledged. True story, we went on to only ever play on that field or be involved with the team in the other years they won. We never lost. We played in 2007 before a bunch of games. In 2013, we played the clinching game at home. And we were due to play game six in 2018, but they won it in five in LA, so we never played that one.

Livestreamed Concert At Fenway Park (2020)

You also played Fenway in 2020, without the Red Sox in the building, and with Bruce Springsteen beaming in on the screen, in an empty stadium. That must have been a really weird day for you guys.

KEN CASEY: Yeah, it was COVID, and it was crazy. Typically when there’s concerts at Fenway, the infield is just completely sealed off. The stage is out in the outfield, the seats are in the outfield, and then you have the stands, but they don’t want anybody to even walk across the infield because they need to maintain the integrity for the season. But since there was no season going on with COVID, we were allowed to actually perform in the infield. The cameras were behind home plate. I was on the pitcher’s mound, one guitar was on first base, bass guitar on second, bagpiper maybe in short center field, another guitar on shortstop.

They only allowed 35 people in the building — essentially one person for every thousand of the capacity in the park. This is what the city came up with with COVID going on. The Red Sox needed 10 people, in terms of security, to staff the building, so we were allowed 25 people. Now, there’s seven band members. With our roadies and stuff, it was another five, so you’re talking 12, and then some of our other staff. I think they had eight people to pull off that broadcast. There was something like five cameras, and I always said the producer of that should have won a friggin’ Emmy, just to be able to pull it off. A livestream, at that stage, wasn’t a perfect science yet. Bandwidth, everything — can you can pull it off?

We’re playing the show, and for all I know, they’re gonna tell us, “Hey, the broadcast crashed. No one even saw it.” We were running around out there playing, and there’s that anxiety, like, “Is this even working? 
Are we on?” We did a set-up for charitable donations — for Mass General Hospital, for one of the main COVID relief funds. I remember our tour manager holding up a sign, and I’m thinking, “Did he mess up a zero?” It was $750,000 that people had donated online during the broadcast. Here I am, at that point in time, I don’t even know if anyone’s watching the thing. No, we’ve raised three quarters of a million dollars during the broadcast. Well, you know people are watching. But at that time, TV was shut down, sports was shut down. I think we had 10 million views that night. The key to having something where that many people watch is to have literally absolutely nothing else happening in the world.


Well, it wasn’t just that, though. People could always put on a movie or whatever. You guys were in this surreal circumstance. It’s always awkward watching a band with no audience, but you were able to pick up the energy and to convey enthusiasm during a time when there wasn’t a lot of that.

KEN CASEY: As weird as it was to not play to fans, the pure joy on my face, of being like a kid in the candy store running around the infield of Fenway — I think I think that offset the fact that there were no fans, to a degree. It was the second one we had done. We had done one immediately, in this little studio on St. Patrick’s Day. We looked back at that and said, OK, we definitely we accomplished what we wanted to, but we definitely had a little bit of that deer in the headlights, where the fuck are the fans kind of look on our face. We made that conscious effort to say we gotta look at the camera, knowing that there are people watching us. You imagine that the fans are there, because they are, but it’s a different vibe. I think we had done a better job of convincing ourselves they’re there because people need to see that enthusiasm and feel it.

Recording And Performing With Bruce Springsteen (2009 onward)

Bruce Springsteen was part of that show. You guys have had a long association with him. How did how did that first start? How did you first come in contact?

KEN CASEY: We were playing a show at Roseland Ballroom, and I was out on the bus. Our tour manager said, “Hey, there’s someone in the dressing room that wants to meet you.” I was like, “OK, I’ll be in in 15 minutes.” And he’s like, “You better come in sooner than that.” I was like, “What?” So I hustled in there, and lo and behold, there was Bruce. I don’t know, he just listens to music, and we were on his radar. We go onstage at Roseland that night, and I didn’t even know where he was going to be, but all of a sudden, I think during the first song, I could see him. I was like, “Oh, fuck, I wish I couldn’t even see him.” People are looking over, like, “Does he look like he’s having a good time?”

You know, he’s just another guy — same, but nothing like, Lars or Billy Bragg. He was just solid guy that we get along with, didn’t even matter that he was Bruce Springsteen. I’ve talked about three people being like that in this interview, but there’s plenty of that that I’ve met that I was like, “Oof, he seems like a dick.” It’s not an automatic that we’re gonna click with someone like that in music, but it’s nice when people you really look up to are the real deal.

Setting Woody Guthrie’s Unused Lyrics To Music (2003-2023)

Obviously, you never got to meet him, but you now have this long association with the Woody Guthrie estate. “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” is part of it, and so are the last two albums before this one.

KEN CASEY: I think it was 2001 and 2002 when I actually went down and first went to the archives and looked through the lyrics. The connection to the Guthrie family has been a real honor. Just the fact that we’ve got the trust from the family, to be involved with bringing their father’s work to light, with his unpublished lyrics, is pretty incredible feeling.

In the documentary that you put out last year, his daughter Nora said that she thought that the “Shipping Up To Boston” lyrics were the dumbest thing that Woody ever wrote. I thought that was great.

KEN CASEY: It really was. We typically don’t write music first with no lyrics. A lot of times, it’ll be based off of vocal melody, and then we’ll start working around it. But we actually had the song finished, and I just needed to write lyrics. I go down, and I’m looking through all the original pieces of paper he wrote these songs on. There’s all these deep lyrics that no one’s ever seen, and I’m like, “Holy shit.” And then I looked at the page, and there’s just, you know, “I’m a sailor peg, I lost my leg. Climbing up the top sails, I lost my leg.” And then the space, and “I’m shipping up to Boston.” I’m like, “What the fuck is this?” But in the minute I looked at the words, I’m like, “Holy shit, that goes in, this is gonna work in that song we have.”

I often say, I think one of the keys to that song’s success is you have the verse, and then there’s this long instrumental part with nothing going on that that makes you have to wait for the chorus. When the chorus comes, it’s a bit of a payoff because you’ve had to wait. If I ever was writing lyrics to this song, I would have definitely never left that empty space. I would have felt like, “That needs words, let’s write a pre-chorus.” But we couldn’t add any words ’cause there were no other words.

Beating Up A Nazi Onstage (2013) And Winning A Bet With Trump Supporters In Crowd (2025)

You had a big online moment earlier this year, with the bet with the guy in the MAGA hat at your show, and it contrasted so sharply with the moment back in 2013 where you also went viral. That time, it was because somebody did a Nazi salute at one of your shows, and you beat the shit out of him. It’s sort of an interesting evolution there, you having to deal with people at your shows who are expressing ideas that are repellent.

KEN CASEY: Well, when you’re talking about out-and-out sieg heiling Nazis — in the punk world, street-punk and oi music, there’s always been that element that is not showing up confused, thinking we like them. 
They’re showing up to either A, physically come after us or B, fuck up the show by disrupting it and beating people up or by their form of protest — to say, “We’re gonna come here because we know there’s a lot of anti-racists here, and we want to be divisive.” So we’ve been down that road many a time since the start of our career, where we’ve had to get into it with that opposing faction. It’s just something we’ve always had to do. As you grow as a band and you go from playing 500-capacity clubs to thousands, all that gets a little watered down. We really haven’t had to deal with that. Probably the last incident we had to do that was 2013, the one you mentioned that went viral. It had been a while before something like that had happened prior to that.

At the time, we used to let everyone onstage to close the show. I looked over, and there was a guy sieg heiling and standing on our stage with all the other fans. There’s no room for discussion there. I can’t go over and have a talk with him mid-song and tell him, “You’re not welcome here.” If we allow someone to stand on our stage doing a Nazi salute, in my eyes, that’s a form of condoning it. So my opinion was, he’s gotta go, and he’s gotta go immediately. What’s the fastest way to get him to go? Hit him with my guitar. That’s not something we want to be dealing with, you know?

Fast forward to the MAGA thing. I don’t want to conflate this guy with being the same as a guy doing a Nazi salute. I do obviously think that the MAGA movement has given rise to more white power views and especially people publicizing them. But this typical guy was just, come to find out, a fan of the band. He’s obviously voted for Trump, and he was doing it as a form of friendly protest. It was a guy and his son. They had MAGA hats, and they had a blow-up of Trump’s head on a stick. I’m not trying to play a show and go around and ask everyone’s political affiliation in the venue, but when you’re front row and you got MAGA shirts, MAGA hats, and a blow-up with Trump’s head, you’re obviously looking for some attention.

Not every night might I be so calm and wanting to have such respect for debate. I’m only human, right? If someone’s coming with that attitude, I might assume they have worse intentions.
 But for whatever reason, it popped into my mind that I’m gonna get one of our shirts that’s made in America and challenge this guy to see if his shirt is made in America, which they usually aren’t. Someone could say, “Oh, it was it was probably a bootleg.” And I say OK, maybe it was a bootleg. Maybe it wasn’t Trump’s official merchandise. But if your whole movement is Make America Great Again, then you would think you’d be the type of person that would take a look at the tag. That was the point.

The reason I say I’m so glad that I took a more tactful tone — when they lost the bet, they had smiles on their face, they took their shirts off, we switched. We went down and talked to the guy afterwards, and I said, “Hey, thanks for being a good sport and honoring the bet.” And he said, “I consider you family. I’ve been coming to see you for 20 years, and I don’t let politics get in the way of family.” I didn’t expect that out of a guy who was showing up front row at the Dropkick Murphys with a MAGA shirt. So credit where credit’s due, he was willing to have friendly dialogue and, by taking the shirt off, admit where he was a bit of a walking hypocrisy at that moment. It gave me a little hope that night that we could have a little bit of dialogue and discussion without it turning into arguing and screaming at each other.

You still got that hope?

KEN CASEY: Depends what day you ask me, you know what I mean? Interaction like that will give me hope, and then 90% of my other interactions, including with friends that I have known my whole life, make me go, “Fuck, it’s beyond hope.” It’s a sickness. It’s a poison. Obviously, there’s a bunch of the band’s fans that are butthurt that we’re so involved in this, and I say, I don’t know what to tell you. We haven’t changed in 30 years. It’s been the same exact message, and our fanbase was in lockstep with us for most of that. Then this fucking asshole came down the escalator and started lying to working class people, saying he had their best interests in mind. All the while, he has a huge reputation for stiffing contractors, not paying his bills, giving two shits less about anybody beneath him on the economic ladder. And now all of a sudden, my friends and the band’s fans that used to see eye-to-eye with us and our beliefs are now calling the band commies and telling us we don’t know who has the best interests in the working class.

Listen, I’m not here to wave a flag for any political party. I think it’s class war more than politics. The 1% divides us, and we argue amongst each other while they steal everything out the back door. All I’m saying is, look at the track record — the way Republicans, especially MAGA Republicans, vote. When do they introduce anything politically that benefits the working class? It’s always for the wealthy. I’m not saying that Democrats don’t oftentimes look out for the wealthy, as well. But look at the track record and who votes in favor of helping people. More often, I would say it’s the Democratic Party. I don’t want to be on the side that votes to take away a kids’ school lunches and that kind of stuff. Do I wish it wasn’t a broken two-party political system? 
Hell yeah. If we had a different system, we’d probably have better leaders.

For The People is out 7/4 digitally on Dummy Luck Music/[PIAS], with physical editions coming in October.