Today’s Random Album of the Day is We Have Fed You All A Thousand Years from Utah Phillips. This is a highly political album that is half spoken word and half pro-union folk songs.
This album is really fun. Utah Phillips has good jokes and such. And the songs can be inspiring or funny. Obviously you have to agree politically. And on labor I absolutely do. Fighting for the working class is worth it. Anyhow, lots of memories listening to Utah Phillips. Good stuff…
Rating: 9.5
Favorite Track(s): “Mr. Block” always sticks out as hilarious and apropos politically. “The Preacher and the Slave” is always fun. You will get pie in the sky when you die, that’s a lie! And who doesn’t love “Casey Jones – The Union Scab” song? And of course we all love “Bread and Roses”. “Joe Hill” is a classic. It has been covered so many times. OMG “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” is great. The story helps this one along for sure. And of course “Solidarity Forever”. That song always reminds me of a DC protest I was in where the cops pinned us in and then arrested all 500 of us. We stood there trapped and sang this song as we waited for them to make their move. We eventually won a lawsuit against them for that arrest. “There is Power in a Union” is a great anthem.
Keep or Trash: Keep.
Background
Every day, or nearly every day anyhow, I will randomly select an album from my collection of digital music, listen to it, and share it here. – Jayne
My wife and I are board gamers and we gamify nearly everything in life. This includes our music listening. We use a dice catapult to roll dice and then use the dice results to pick our vinyl listens. So why not do something similar for the blog?
I have made the randomizer table I use for picking the album of the day available! What? It’s a simple table but uses some weird dice. If you are not familiar, if you say D30 that means a 30 sided die. These are the dice the randomizer table uses: D30, D4, D8, D10, D12, D14, and D20. The D14 and D30 are unique but you can buy cheap packs of dice with those in them off the internet.
The basic steps are to 1) roll the D30. That picks the starting letter or if it’s a number. 2) Then use the chart roll the die associated with the first letter to pick the second letter. If you get “Other” that means numbers or some other weird character. If none of those exist re-roll. 3) Once you have the second letter you can use that to roll for a third letter if needed. 4) That should get you down to a few artists and from there you pick dice based on the number of artists. 5) finally for the artist selected you roll a die for the number of albums listed. Then you have your Random Album to listen to….
Download the Random Album Selector Table here: