Emmett Doyle

My songs will take you on a journey from the Farm Crisis of the 1980s and its consequences, through mechanization and the changing face of quarrying towns, to a letter to a soldier deployed in Afghanistan, to a satirical take on the billionaire space race.

Songs highlight issues like Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, homelessness in the Twin Cities, the repression of anarchists and antifascists in Belarus and Russia, the need for community self defense against white supremacy, and the problem that union bureaucracies pose to rank and file militancy. The 1934 Teamsters Strike, the 1983 P9 Hormel Strike, the 2021 John Deere Strike, and the 1992 Southern California Drywallers strike all are celebrated in ballads. The deadly 2013 Sartell Mill explosion is commemorated, as is the East Palestine OH derailment, in a song written in response to the unfolding news while the recording was underway. There’s even a moonshining ballad about the MN 13 whiskey distilled in my hometown during Prohibition.