Will Kimbrough
It could be that Will Kimbrough’s new full-length For the Life of Me remains too evenhanded to qualify as a political album, but you might come away from the Nashville singer and guitarist’s survey of post-Trump culture with a sense of unease. For the Life of Me contains a series of songs that are as Nashville-specific as Kimbrough’s slick guitar style and his well-mannered vocals. Kimbrough and a set of sympathetic co-writers address the malaise of an era fraught with attacks on democracy, but For the Life of Me is the work of a pop optimist, with guitar in hand.
Kimbrough’s guitar powers For the Life of Me throughout, and the songs sit easily within the confines of power pop and rock. A well-traveled guitarist who has worked with Americana stars like Emmylou Harris and Todd Snider, Kimbrough moved to Nashville in early 1988 from his native Mobile, Ala., as a member of Will and the Bushmen, a Music City-meets-New Wave band of the era. Along the way, Kimbrough — who turns 60 on May 1 — has played with fellow Nashville rocker Tommy Womack in the band DADDY and has written and recorded with the late Jimmy Buffett.
For the Life of Me peaks with the most overtly political song on the album, “I Don’t Want to Start a War,” which he wrote with Bobby Hall. The song’s protagonist is a Grateful Dead fan who participates in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. As Kimbrough tells me from his Nashville home, the song is based on the true story of someone Hall had known since the 1980s.
“It’s a puzzle, but it’s a puzzle for the listener to figure out if they choose,” Kimbrough says. “Then again, it’s not a puzzle — it’s a true story. Sometimes when you just tell a true story, it seems so bizarre. Events keep happening, and you have to process it — or don’t.”
“I Don’t Want to Start a War” lopes along like an outtake from the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station. Kimbrough and Hall tell the tale of a Dead fan who becomes unhinged in 1986 after he hears that Jerry Garcia has slipped into a coma. Flash-forward to 2021, and the same Dead fan is now storming the Capitol building, in thrall to Trump’s conspiracy theories.
Will Kimbrough
The song works as satire, since Kimbrough and Hall make the connection between the communal aspects of Dead fandom and the community provided by conspiratorial believers. As Kimbrough sings: “Zip-tie guy with his mean old mom / Waiting for Sidney to file a brief / QAnon shaman in his buffalo hat / I swear we tripped with him on Shakedown Street.”
Still, I had to ask Kimbrough exactly which Sidney he’s referring to in the song. He tells me it’s North Carolina lawyer Sidney Powell, who in 2020 joined the Trump team that was seeking to overturn that year’s presidential election. Powell pleaded guilty in 2023 to misdemeanor charges brought by the state of Georgia that are related to her efforts to subvert the election, and she will testify against the other defendants in the case.
“I Don’t Want to Start a War” suggests that the tie-dyed mentality of rock fans might not lend itself to understanding politics and culture. Meanwhile, Kimbrough sings about the legacy of a ship that landed illegally in Mobile, Ala., in 1860 with 110 enslaved people from West Africa in “Clotilda’s on Fire.” For the Life of Me is partly an album about the dark side of Southern history, and Kimbrough strives to understand the motives of his Dead-fan-turned-insurrectionist, as he tells me.
“To him, it’s the same thing: to find a community of free-spirited people who are Deadheads. And then, I guess, as a resentful old guy.”
