AMERICAN PICTURES
DAN PALLOTTA
Watch the Video for the Single, “The Mailman”
Full Album Available on All Streaming Platforms Now
American Pictures Available NoW
Listen to the full album on your favorite streaming platform
The Mailman SINGLE AVAILABLE NOW
“The Mailman” may top the list of my favorite song I’ve ever written. It was inspired by something John Prine once said about the years when he was a mailman himself. He said, “If it wasn’t in an envelope, I read everything.” The song is about the common joys and sorrows of the human condition as seen through the person who delivers our birthday cards, condolence cards, college acceptance and rejection letters; the person who watches our children grow as they greet them in the driveway everyday, the person who notices that someone doesn’t get any mail anymore after they’ve passed. It’s about our existence as seen through the lens of the person who sometimes gets to see the future before we do.
KEITH SMERAGE SINGLE AVAILABLE NOW
In 1921 the President of Harvard created a secret court to purge the campus of homosexuals. Fourteen students were expelled. Three took their own lives. One of them, Keith Smerage, came from my town and is buried in the cemetery a mile from where I work each day. I’m gay and I went to Harvard, so the proximity of Keith's final resting place is not all we have in common. This song is about him and bending the arc of the moral universe toward justice. It's the third single from my new album, “American Pictures.” The single and video are available now.
CHARITY TOWN SINGLE AVAILABLE NOW
I did a lot of public speaking for community foundation in towns that have fallen upon hard times. The big paper mill or textile plant has left, leaving the community without an economic engine. Local generosity is all that’s left. You see boarded up stores and thrift shops and social service agencies where there used to be a thriving downtown. And while charity and philanthropy can be powerful drivers of change, they can only do so much when everything else is gone. This song is about the picture and the people left behind when the future has moved on.
JOHN F. KENNEDY SINGLE AVAILABLE NOW
The song is about a dream I actually had several years ago in which I came down a flight of stairs and saw John Kennedy lying on a table about to die. Carl Jung always said that the characters in your dreams are actually a part of yourself. So it’s not so much a song literally about John F. Kennedy as it is about a part of myself that had been obsessed with the need to achieve something big in order to feel self-actualized, and about the liberation that came from the death of that obsession.
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