But I had a listen the other day, and it's awfully close to being done. Close enough to let some of these babies out into the world.
Download an advance MP3 of the album's first track, "Poor Lazarus."
This is the song that stared it all — the first track on the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. One night it got stuck in my head with guitars doing the work of picks and shovels — a kind of grunge-era "Heartbreak Hotel" version of a hundred-year-old ballad. Thus was born An Education and a Riot.
As Alan Lomax wrote in Folk Song USA,
It is said that Laz'us worked on the levee camps in the days when you worked from can to can't (from when you can see in the morning to when you can't see at night) and maybe they paid you and maybe they didn't. Laz'us got tired of finding meat (worms) in his greens, so he decided to walk the table. You had to be really disgusted and really tough to walk the table in a levee camp, tromping right down the middle of the mess table and slapping your big muddy shoes right in everybody's plates. Po' Laz'us walked the table that day with a blue-steel revolver in each hand. He knew that the white boss would give him a whipping for what he had done, so he decided to go all the way. He walked over to the commissary, introduced himself by poking his pistols in the pay-clerk's window and then took off with the payroll.
The ballad picks up the story at this point describing the death of this tough guy with obvious sympathy and in powerfully tragic lines. You cannot fail to know, when you hear a gang of men on the road shouting out this ballad-work-song in rhythm with their picks, that they had often wished to do what Po' Laz'us had done, never mind the consequences.
