It was my honor to play as the opening act at the Saint Paul College muster site for the third No Kings mass rally on Saturday March 28 in St Paul, which was the focal point rally of the nationwide wave. Like my neighbors across the Twin Cities and the rest of Minnesota, I have spent this long winter of Metro Surge volunteering for the safety of my community, organizing and resisting, and taking some time to write songs. It has also been a winter of some substantial personal changes in my life, both hard ones and ones that have been for the best. 

I have not updated the news on this site in a while, as a result, even as some of my more satirical material like "Dick Blizzard" went briefly viral, my new band the Last Words debuted at Disgraceland, or as my companions and I worked on our upcoming album, Mother Anarchy, which is coming out in late April. 

This was my second No Kings performance, following the October show in downtown Minneapolis, but held a different gravity, in the wake of the murders of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and Victor Manuel Diaz, the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis, and the abduction of thousands of our neighbors in the occupation of our city by the regime's forces. 

As I said to the crowd yesterday, I consider myself one of the luckiest musicians in the world. Every show I play, I get to play to a city of heroes. I am so proud of each and every one of my neighbors. I know Renee, and Alex, and Victor would be proud of us. I play in honor of everyone we have lost to the guns, camps, and flights of the regime. 

I played my song Sanctuary, which expressed my renewed sense of solidarity and trust in our Twin Cities community forged in struggle. I also played The Stake, a translation of Lluis Llach's L'estaca, which I had also played in October, as a reminder that, like Franco's regime, this too shall pass. Long winters come to an end, and the spring is coming. 

​One hope! One dream! The fall of the regime!

I'm pleased to announce the release of 12 Blues- an album of my simpler, bluesier songs, recorded at home. Due to the financial and time restrictions of studio albums and my huge backlog of material, it's likely that home recorded albums like this will be the main releases in the coming years- which will also mean that there will be much more material being released. 

The album showcases many of my simpler bluesy arrangements. The themes are consistent with my broader body of work. I open up with Malvina Reynold's I Don't Mind Failing, a personal anthem, which I recorded the day after a retaliatory firing for organizing. Blue collar life informed Hard to Make a Living, written in my head on a man-chain on some refinery scaffolding, and Low Water Blues and Fuck it All, both about being a deckhand, the latter written in the galley one shift in late October and later sung during a work stoppage. Union struggles abound in songs like Brookwood Blues, about the coal mine strike, and The Union Sent the Bulldogs In, written in thanks to some hard-fighting Carpenter BAs. Despair, perseverance, and personal struggles come up in Too Late and Tomorrow Me. I talk about my neighborhood changing in Ford Parkway Blues, which talks about the plant at which the truck in My Truck Is My Elder was probably built. I turn my eye to the wider world in Kazakhstan Blues, written as Russian troops poured into Almaty in 2022, and also in Imperialist Racket Blues, about the good cop/bad cop routine world powers play with countries like Ukraine, by seizing some of their resources with a invader's tanks and others as collateral to a patron's banks to help them fight off those invaders. 12 Blues is, of course, dedicated to the Minneapolis Police Department. 

Sic semper, porcis! 

In a contest being put on by Labor Notes and the Pittsburgh Labor Choir, my song Hold Fast has won Strike Song of the Year 2025. The contest was a call for songs about a general strike, with the aim of findings songs that can be picked up and learned by crowds of people. This song is meant to be sung by masses in the streets, not as a solo piece. 

There will be a teach-in for this and other songs at 11 AM Central Time on April 26th 2025. Details and link below. 

I relied heavily on the tradition of call and response spirituals in the labor and civil rights movement, especially the the musical tradition of Black struggle, as a starting point. I intentionally recycle some lines and motifs from other union songs of mine, to feed those pieces into this general strike anthem. This includes the "Hold the Line" motif that now has appeared in two versions of "Holding the Line", and in Jessica Garraway's environmental justice song of the same name which I helped her compose. "Put your tools down and walk out" is from the Big 3 Auto Strike song, and "fire in your belly and iron in your spine" is from the Marathon Strike Song. Several other lines reference revolutionary quotes from Durruti's "New world in our hearts" to Connolly's "We demand only the earth". I intentionally took lines from my existing body of work in order to roll those struggles up together into the general strike call. 

Lyrics and chords
​Am Dm E
People rise up, people shout- put your tools down and walk out
E Am
Hold fast! All together, hold the line!
Am Dm E
Every worker in this land, strike together hand in hand
G Dm E
Hold fast! All together, hold the line!
Chorus
Am
Hold the line! Hold the line!
Dm E
Hold it for the future, yours and mine-
Am Dm E
With a fire in your belly, and iron in your spine!
E Am
Hold fast! All together, hold the line!
Cross our arms and plant our feet, and we’ve got the system beat
Not a single wheel will turn, ‘til we’ve taken what we’ve earned
King Don can build his wall, but the curtain always falls
Soon the first will be the last, and we’ll march out of the past
This old world has come apart, there’s a new one in our hearts
Workers know what we are worth- we demand only the earth


General Strike Song Contest 2025 Online Teach-In
Song share, chant share, and teach-in
Saturday, April 26, from 12:00-1:30pm US Eastern time
11:00am Central
10:00am Mountain
9:00am Pacific

Registration Link Here

 I'm proud to announce that Rust Belt Ballads, my debut solo album, came out over Labor Day Weekend, with two shows- one at the Acadia in Minneapolis and the other at Milk and Honey Cider in St Joe- to promote it. 

The album is a work that contains songs I've written over the last decade, chronicling both the transformation of the Midwest from Steel Belt to Rust Belt and the new rising worker resistance that is coming out of decades of class warfare... and my own journey from a farm kid  to a union militant rank and filer in the Cities. 

I was interviewed about it by Socialist News and Views with Nick Shillingford, and by Will Moore at WTIP. 

I want to thank Charlie Bruber, Mattie Ernst, Wendy Schoen, Will Moore, all the former Wooden Shoe Ramblers, Liza Gorkova, and so many others for helping make Rust Belt Ballads a reality. 

You can download it at https://emmettdoyle.bandcamp.com/album/rust-belt-ballads and stream it on most streaming platforms. 

I am already plugging away at the next album; the songs are already written and being arranged and practiced.