From punk to country: the evolution of Jon Langford

Progressive, The, May, 2004 by Jon M. Gilbertson

Langford has recently extended his explorations. In 2003, he collaborated with the Sadies, a quintet of Canadian alt-country stalwarts, on the slick Mayors of the Moon. This April he released his second solo album, All the Fame of Lofty Deeds, which utilizes the fictional Deeds as a phantom stand-in for both the country singers of the mid-twentieth century and Langford himself. From the ragged croak of "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" to the gallows grin of Bob Wills's "Trouble in Mind," Lofty Deeds tells a story of exploitation that would have been as familiar to Hank Williams as it is to Langford. Bloodshot Records co-founder Rob Miller certainly thinks so.

"I look at the record as a cautionary tale of how the mass culture will just use people for their purposes and then spit them out," Miller says. "The most archetypal country music was all made by outsiders in their times, like Bob Wills and Johnny Cash, who wouldn't play by the rules, and the industry was turning its back on them. Jon fits into that tradition. He has been through the major-label grinder."

Not content with being a forty-six-year-old man with a workload that would stun most people half iris age, Langford is also putting together an artist-based record label of his own and trying out material with Ship and Pilot, yet another band with drummer Steve Goulding.

On top of that, Langford is a painter and illustrator who does the covers for most of his own music and sells his art commercially to support that music.

Then there is the matter of his family: his wife, the woman he followed to Chicago in the first place; and two kids, the main reasons he puts in all the effort for music and activism.

"I would feel bad later to have them ask me, 'Did they have the death penalty when you were a kid?' and say, 'Yeah, we did,'" Langford says. "1 feel compelled to do things that I think are going to make the world slightly better."

Jon M. Gilbertson is a Wisconsin-based freelance music and culture writer.