Saturday, April 25, 2020

The Liar Tweets Tonight—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

The Liar Tweets Tonight by Ron Zimmerman and the ReZisters.

I have posted no overtly political songs so far in the Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival or any of the several satires created for the Coronavirus epidemic that have been posted all over social media and YouTube.  Instead I have preferred to harvest and present existing sounds in various genres that in some way speak to our present condition.  But Roy Zimmerman’s fresh new video The Liar Tweets Tonight is to spot on and hilarious to pass up.

Roy Zimmerman on stage.
Zimmerman has often been compared to Tom Lehrer over his thirty-year career—topical, insightful, and hilarious.  His songs have also been compared to the long-running ensemble revues by the Capital Steps but that group plays for those in power in Washington and the media insiders who watch them and must tread lightly to avoid seriously offending the powerful or offering and really radical commentary.  Zimmerman does not care whose toes are trampled and is unapologetically on the Left.

Zimmerman's wife and collaborator Melanie Harby.
He co-writes most of his songs with his wife Melanie Harby, a three-time West Coast bluegrass guitar champion and an actress/singer in the original cast of Quilters on Broadway.  In addition to their satirical songs Zimmerman and Harby have also written hundreds of children’s songs for Disney, Warner Bros, Looney Tunes, and McGraw and Hill.

Zimmerman's most recent album.
Zimmerman has produced 19 albums, most recently Rize Up, and tours relentlessly playing on college campuses, coffee houses and folk clubs, and very frequently Unitarian Universalist churches.  A couple of years ago he played at the Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry, Illinois.  He says that he:
…brings laughter and encouragement to the Blue Dots—the most progressive people in some of the least progressive places in the nation. I get accused of preaching to the converted, but that’s not how I think of it. I think of it as entertaining the troops.

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