Photo taken from artist’s Bandcamp page.
Canadian singer-songwriter Jennifer Holub recently released her sophomore album, The Reckoning. The songs on the album features a gripping narrative which explores issues of social justice. One of the album’s tracks, “Island” was previously featured as a Daily Dose of Protest.
One of the highlights of the album is “Way Out.” Holub made the following statement about the tune to No Depression: “The song ‘Way Out’ speaks to the systemic problem of incarceration and hints at the politicized reasons for incarceration. It was inspired by the Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill 1979 documentary called Tattooed Tears that documents a failed experiment in youth incarceration. When the youth were experimentally tried and convicted as adults, the outcome was disastrous. The lyric ‘three months has turned itself to six for a dime’ speaks to specific incidences where youth in the prison system were brought in on relatively small charges, but because of the method of institutionalization, being tried as adults, they were adopting criminal behaviour and their sentences were being elongated.”
The powerful music video was filmed at the abandoned Burwash Prison near Sudbury, Ontario. The visuals add potency to the message.
Lyrics such as “It’s been 17 years of failure to bloom / With leaves like weeds that bend for shame / I don’t act like a man cause I never was a boy,
just a ward of the state, for shame” resonates in light of systemic failures of an overly punitive incarceration system which fails to acknowledge humanity.