Linda Draper is having none of it – this pretence that when disasters strike they strike us all equally and we’re suddenly all in a unified state. As she sings on ‘Tether‘: “Talk is cheap still they keep speaking in their crooked tongues / Trying to sell me the idea we’re all in this together / I beg to differ… I beg to differ / We were never all in this together / There is no tether nor was there ever.” It’s a depressingly universally applicable thought – it’s not at all hard to think of UK based usages of that laughable phrase “all in this together” that have proven to be so very, very far from true.
For Linda Draper the inspiration to write the song came as the first lockdowns arrived for the global pandemic, as she explained: “I wrote this song during lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic. I was amazed and disgusted with how, literally overnight, every TV commercial, news outlet, and talk show was suddenly barraging us with these insincere and overly sentimental messages about how we are all in this together. If there is anything that maybe everyone can all agree on these days, it is that we are not all in this together. We have never been more divided and distrustful. Those cozy little bubbles that we got ourselves stuck in just keep on popping. Now it’s time to face the music.”
‘Tether‘ is taken from Draper’s new album ‘Patience and Lipstick‘, which is released through her newly formed label South Forty Records.
