“A fine blend of Beatles-esque dreamy folk” — AMERICANA HIGHWAYS

protest songs with ‘big dad energy’

The Pinkerton Raid’s songwriter Jesse James DeConto has been a dad since he was 24 years old. He spent the first two-and-a-half decades of this new millennium raising two kids with their mom and now their step-mom and his big, extended family. Themes of fatherhood have sprouted up throughout his six previous full-length albums, but never with the focus you’ll find on IF YOU LOVE SOMEBODY, TELL THEM.

Having cut his teeth as a journalist in the first 20 years of his career, Jesse is a storyteller, and the stories you hear in the songs and between the songs have a lot to do fighting for his kids to have a future amidst climate change, democratic collapse and America’s dangerous concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a greedy few.

Go see a live show with The Pinkerton Raid, and Jesse might share about his history in Lawrence, Mass., the birthplace of the Labor Movement; his dad’s stint with Jimmy Carter’s Job Corps program in the late ‘70s; facing COVID rent strikes as a small-time landlord; visiting his grandfather’s hometown in Sicily at the same time ICE was cracking down on immigrants back home; or consoling his GenZ daughter after Elon Musk cut her job at Fish & Wildlife. He’s a poet, steeped in the mysticism of STAR WARS and Celtic lore, the existentialism of Kerouac, the naturalism of THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Standing Rock and Laurel Canyon, the liberation politics of Woody Guthrie and John Lennon, but also in his family’s real life, with all its complications. There is a fair number of songs about trees.

Co-produced with The Collection’s David Wimbish and Bombadil’s James Phillips, IF YOU LOVE SOMEBODY, TELL THEM is a protest album with an unlikely title. “Protest songs are love songs because the only politics worth a lick are those based in loving our neighbors,” Jesse says. “You tell somebody you love them by listening to them, by acting on what they say if you’re able, and, as fellow citizens, by voting in people and policies that serve them.”

Singles like “Wishing Wells,” “This Machine Kills Loneliness,” “The Fight for Freedom Was in Vogue” and “Strawberry Ice (and the World Burns)” reckon with social inequities, mass trauma and the possibilities of taking care of one another through the chaos, with art as an essential tool. The opening track “They Were the Children” is “immensely moving,” says AMERICANA HIGHWAYS, while “The Village” “simultaneously plumbs the depth of the both the state of the world and the human heart.” Naming “We Tremble with the Noise” as a top North Carolina song for 2025, WCHL said, “In a year full of radical protest music, the best political song of all might actually be this more conciliatory one.”

Jesse grew up on the mellow gold of his mom’s car radio and his dad’s guitar: Liverpool, The Village, Soulsville and Motown, now spinning out songs AMERICANA-UK calls “anthemic.” Critics have heard echoes from Iron & Wine and Neil Young to Wilco and The Killers. He’s opened for Sunny War, Amythyst Kiah, TopHouse and Noah Gundersen. He played an official showcase at Folk Alliance International 2025 and has been slotting at Mile of Music, AVLFest, Cosmic Songwriter and other grassroots festivals with artists like Carsie Blanton, Tommy Prine and River Whyless. He writes soft-spoken protest songs with Big Dad Energy, and there is a fair number of songs about trees.

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