On his new song, Gary Marks turns his songwriter vision on recent events in his homeland, starting from an unprecedented riot in Washington to the, perhaps, surprising eventual fallout from that event. As Marks explains: “I wrote this song shortly after January 6th, when Americans could still pretend it was just a very dark day brought about by a president who’d gone mad. Since then, working people have been forced to pay Trump’s tariffs while the rich get tax cuts. And the people who attacked the Capitol have been pardoned by the man whose lies brought them there. This is a war against democracy, plain and simple, and no one is coming to rescue us. The Supreme Court won’t save us. The current Congress won’t save us. The last line of this song asks the question, “Will this be the end or the beginning… of us?”
For five decades, Marks has written songs about power, compassion, democracy, and freedom; he’s also a prolific author, having written more than twenty novels and novellas, including his new novel The Dance and the Diamond Sky, which focuses on young pacifists, a college-dropout songwriter, and political radicals confronting war, injustice, and an intensely divided culture in 1969. For Gary Marks, this is not a nostalgic trip back to the sixties; it’s a warning from one divided America to another.
