Petaluma Records to Release STOP, HEY WHAT'S THAT SOUND

In January of 2020, as Americans get set to vote in the presidential primaries, Petaluma Records will release Stop, Hey What's That Sound: Classic Protest Songs Reimagined with liner notes from famed music critic Rob Tannenbaum. Announced the compilation for a January 31, 2020 release with a premiere of a video for Renee Holiday & Nigel Harrison's (Blondie) cover of Patti Smith's 1988, "People Have The Power" via Audiofemme - listen below! Proceeds from the single, out tomorrow, will go to support Headcount.org.

In 2016, when Trump was elected, political pundits and cultural vanguardists, while trying to look on the bright side of a global catastrophe, predicted Trump's election would catalyze a great new era of protest songs, a revival of punk-rock activism and idealism. The children of Joe Strummer and Joan Baez would run free and set fire to our culture, purifying it by burning it.... We're still waiting.

Acclaimed songwriter and producer, Roger McEvoy Greenawalt, who has worked with Joe Strummer, Nils Lofgren, Iggy Pop, Ric Ocasek, and Rufus Wainwright, among others, got out his sling-shot. After moving from New York to Los Angeles, Greenawalt launched Petaluma Records with his cousin Nion McEvoy, the illustrious Chairman & CEO of San Francisco's Chronicle Books, and co-executive producer of the wildly successful Mr. Rogers doc "Won't You Be My Neighbor".

On Stop, Hey What's That Sound: Classic Protest Songs Reimagined, Greenawalt and his virtual Rolodex of friends recast some of the best-known Boomer anthems, snatching them back from car commercials and PBS fundraising drives in order to reinvigorate them with new sounds, rhythms, and melodies. Greenawalt chose songs mostly from the 1960s and early 1970s, thinking specifically about icons whose songs are so familiar, we don't even think about what they mean: Joni Mitchell, Curtis Mayfield, John Fogerty, John Lennon, Neil Young, and Stevie Wonder. The album ends with a ringer: a 1990s song, by No Doubt, that isn't usually classified as a protest song.

After releasing a string of singles & an album in 2016 as Shaprece, Renee Holiday, is remerging under a new name, with a new musical vision. Nigel Harrison played bass in the pioneering New York new wave band Blondie from 1977 to 1982, and co-wrote several of the group's most-loved songs, including "One Way Or Another" and "Eat To the Beat." Together they have created a stunning re-imagining of Smith's passionate protest to the Reagan/Bush era.

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