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![]() Will Hoge (from the album An American Dream available on EDLO Records) Controversy creates divides whether the gap opens between nations or personal friends. Anger bubbles up, mostly from our inability to understand how others can think so much differently than we do, and be so amazing wrong. Will Hoge ran into that issue, recalling a friend from his high school days with “Nikki’s a Republican Now”, a track from his recent release, An American Dream. Coming on the heels of his successful August 2017 release Anchors, a new album was not something Will Hoge needed for 2018, though he felt it was an album that had to made for his children as an effort to to right/write the course of their future. Putting the promises of An American Dream into the same box as other nighttime fantasies, Will Hoge introduces a character a man who finds daylight hours are the stuff of nightmares in the title track. The songs of An American Dream read as open letters with specific names, addressed to border police, political corruption, anti-intellectualism, poverty, gun control, the broken education system and indifference. As a songwriter Will Hoge wanted to clear out his head, and have a voice, recalling that ‘those things kept me up at night — and this record was less expensive than therapy. Silence couldn't be a part of my deal anymore’. News bulletins about school shootings not only come into the home of Will Hoge, the stories are about others not all that different from the family sitting next to him in front a television screen. Will’s wife is a teacher at the same school as their sons, so for him ‘my kids and their future, that's the biggest thing for me. My boys are eleven and seven, they're happy and healthy kids, and I feel lucky for that every day. Every morning at seven o'clock, everything I care about in the world goes to one building. It takes one knucklehead with a gun going into that one building to ruin all that for me’. Will Hoge talks about school shootings in “Thoughts and Prayers” as he wrestles with personal duality in “Still a Southern Man”. His aims over the borders of “Gilded Walls”, Will Hoge’s words hurtle the barrier between the have’s and have-not’s while the life of immigrant becomes flesh and blood in “The Illegal Line” as An American Dream takes the side of youth against the old and in the way with “Stupid Kids”. Listen and buy the music of Will Hoge from AMAZON https://www.willhoge.com/
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