Not your typical singer/songwriter – or protester – John Aulabaugh in his youth wasn’t disillusioned by images of the Kent State Massacre. He hadn’t grown up reading about Nixon calling out the National Guard in a history book; he’d seen it unfold on the CBS Nightly News with Walter Cronkite. He left his college band behind and became a successful application developer. Now, after putting down his guitar for 25 years and never writing or singing until well after age 50, the 55-year-old Aulabaugh has a different outlook on American culture. On his latest record Of Sins Present and Past (produced by Rami Jaffee of the Foo Fighters and Wallflowers) Aulabaugh brought his emotive directness to the forefront atop explosively passionate production.
On this election day, Glide is proud to premiere the video for “Awake” from Aulabaugh (below) which darkly surveys our country’s blunders. Before we stay tuned to the results tonight (or not) lets look through the lens and voice of John Aulabaugh who literally burns the house down with himself inside it symbolizing a world on fire.
“I just want to help restore some sanity,” Aulabaugh explains. “I live in Central Illinois – the reddest part of a very blue state. I drive by Confederate flags and houses with spray-painted ‘TRUMP’ tags and swastika left by their middle-aged owners. I even burned a poster of myself at 15 to symbolize the loss of innocence,” Aulabaugh continues. “We were the generation everyone was counting on, and we became complacent. As a middle-aged white guy, this is a call to my contemporaries to live by the example set by Martin Luther King.” This sentiment is echoed in the lyrics “…as our leaders speak, my Selma hangs and bleeds in effigy.”
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