This summer The Taxpayers will unleash their new album Big Delusion Factory through Secret Pennies Records. Personally I’ve been anxiously awaiting this album since they released Cold Hearted Town three long years ago, which is why I’m so stoked to premiere the album’s first two tracks “Call Me Linda” and “Easy Money” for you guys today.
Give the tunes a listen and read a bit about their inspiration from singer Rob Taxpayer below.
“Call Me Linda is the oldest song on “Big Delusion Factory”. The opening line comes from a short story in “The Innocent Party” by the author Aimee Parkison, who is a fiction writer that I like. A few years back, I was having some trouble writing anything, and started playing around with that first line. Then I decided to put the character into a different scenario / world than Parkison had; I liked the idea of having this character who lied to people about her name, but also liked the idea that the listener/reader never gets to find out quite why. I decided to put “Linda” into a city that is vastly unprepared for a coming disaster, a few days before the disaster hits.
After finishing the song, I liked it a lot, and decided to write some more songs about this world. In fact, it was similar to how the Henry Turner character came about in “God, Forgive These Bastards” – I wrote the initial song (in the Henry Turner case, it was the song “Who the Hell are You?”), but thought that the character would benefit from having a larger world – i.e. more songs to provide context.
As I am writing this, I am aware of how ridiculous and pretentious this all sounds, but what can I say? I get a kick out of making stuff up, and it makes me happy and it helps me figure things out. So basically, as the months progressed, good stuff and bad stuff happened in my life, and I would throw those things into songs that existed within “Linda’s world” to try to make sense of them.
Which is how the song Easy Money came about. Living in post-Katrina New Orleans you see a lot of this stuff, but really, anyone living in a major American city sees it – our laissez-faire economic neoliberalism society basically ensures the triumph of privatization, deregulation, and private-sector-capitalism above all else. Struggling schools get turned over to private charter companies, which in turn eventually get sold to condo developers. Family homes get bought up by venture capitalists that turn the houses into restaurants or boutiques. It was easy for me to imagine that the city “Linda” lived in before the disaster would eventually follow that route.”
“Big Delusion Factory” is the sixth full-length album by the the goofpunx champs of Portland and New Orleans (and a few places in between)! It tells the story of a woman who tells everyone to call her Linda (even though that’s not her name). It follows her increasing volatility and frustration with the rapid changes happening in the city around her after a natural disaster.
This is their most anthemic and cohesive album yet. It feels like something the Taxpayers have been working up to for a long time. It’s got horns, it’s got piano ballads, it’s got bizarro hardcore punk freakouts, it’s got the shoutalong catchiness of 2010’s “To Risk So Much for One Damn Meal” and the frenzied jazzy punk of their more recent albums “God, Forgive These Bastards” and “Cold Hearted Town”—and there’s so much more to it that it’s probably best to let this one speak for itself. This is one to sit down and think about. It might be one you carry with you for a long time.
“Big Delusion Factory” will be out (digitally and on vinyl) via Secret Pennies Records on August 1, 2016. Preorders will ship on or slightly before that date. This is a run of 500 LPs: 150 translucent blue vinyl and 350 black.