Already Dead’s ‘Landlord’ is a protest song for the modern labor … – WBUR News

This is an exclusive song premiere, part of WBUR’s effort to highlight New England musicians.

One never knows when inspiration will strike. For Massachusetts punk band Already Dead, it came when frontman Dan Cummings was cleaning his garage, and listening to the Working Class History podcast. The show was airing an interview with the late historian and Boston University professor Howard Zinn, who talked about his hardscrabble childhood with immigrant parents who were always “one step ahead of the landlord in the Depression years.”

“I just had to go grab my guitar,” says Cummings of the band’s powerful new acoustic single “Landlord,” a tale of trying to keep a roof over a head during a time of inflation, gentrification and a housing crisis. “The struggles people are having making rent had been on my mind, so when I heard that podcast it just clicked that it’d be a great starter for a song, and I just went and wrote it that night.”

The fast-strummed song’s imagery about “running, running out of time” details the constant stress of housing insecurity, as Cummings sings about how “The work’s dried up/ The storm has hit/ There’s no piece of mind.”

Both the song and the North of Boston-based band are throwbacks to when punk rock often meant politically charged songs written and played by working class musicians. Cummings works as a Boston union pipefitter, while the band’s bassist, Brandon Bartlett, is a Boston union ironworker. Drummer Nick Cali operates large commercial vehicles. The three had been friends and members of other Boston bands before joining forces for their appropriately titled 2022 debut “My Collar is Blue,” which earned the group a 2022 Boston Music Awards nomination. An electric full band version is likely to show up on a future project.

Even while many of his colleagues are finding that work is plentiful thanks to Boston’s building boom, Cummings says that they’re still facing the fact that “rent keeps going up and the cost of living keeps going up. Your food budget from two years ago won’t feed your family now. … There’s a looming feeling because we’re doing physical labor, and if you get injured and put out of work it could really fall between the cracks.”

While the song addresses tough times, it also offers some optimism: “But there’s still time/ Just one more fair wage job/ And they’ll keep the lights on,” sings Cummings. In the video, partly filmed North Reading’s Sports, Spirits & Steaks, a dishwasher can only come home with a few gallons of gas in his car and a hot pocket for dinner, but his spirit is lifted when he sees a drawing his young son made for him.

As a union member, Cummings has observed the dramatic rise in direct action as everyone from Hollywood actors and screenwriters to local hospital employees have gone on strike. “I just read that over 360,000 workers have gone on strike this year, which is 10 times the amount in 2021,” he says. “The SAG-AFTRA and the UAW, you may not consider them to be the same workforce, but they’re both striking for more livable wages and better working conditions and they’re going against companies that take in record profits, and that’s a story that’s far too old in America.”

Cummings is happy to bring his guitar to a picket line — he sang for local UPS employees this summer when they were considering a strike, and the band has appeared at the Bread & Roses Labor Day Festival in Lawrence.

“Some of my early interest in politics, even as a teenager, was because I listened to punk rock bands,” he says. “Maybe I didn’t fully understand everything, but it sparked an interest. It made me want to go read, it made me want to learn. Sometimes a melody is a lot more memorable than a page in a history book.”