“It’s been difficult to do something like [multiple shows in a row] coming out of the pandemic because there are so many bands touring now,” he says via Zoom from a Worchester, MA tour stop. “The Grog Shop has always been kind to us, and I anticipate nothing less than that for these shows. Cleveland is only two hours away [from Pittsburgh], and we cut our teeth there and at smaller towns in Pennsylvania. It was where the band first felt like we were true troubadours and finally venturing out of our garages.”
With its latest album, Lies They Tell Our Children, Anti-Flag gets conceptual. The songs center on imminent threats to the quality of life, from the lack of affordable health care to wealth inequality. While writing about political matters is nothing new for the band, writing songs that revolve around a common theme is.
“It’s our 13th record, and when you’ve done something for over half of your life, you start to investigate ways of keeping things a challenge,” says Barker when asked about how the band decided to go the concept album route. “We’ve had this happen in the past. You get on an escalator and just go. The art becomes emotionless. It gets created for different reasons than it should. You make a record because you have to tour, or you make a record because the festivals won’t put you on the bill unless you have something new out. That’s never a great space.”
Coming out of the pandemic and having a record that was three years old, the band wanted to use the album to make a statement. It made a master list of political and cultural shifts and then turned that list into 11 compelling songs.
“We found that [challenging ourselves] is when we’re at our best — it’s when we enjoy the process but also become better versions of ourselves,” says Barker.
Guests on the album include a list of punk/metal icons, including Killswitch Engage’s Jesse Leach, Silverstein’s Shane Told, Bad Cop/Bad Cop’s Stacy Dee, Pinkshift’s Ashrita Kumar, Bad Religion’s Brian Baker and Rise Against’s Tim McIlrath.
“The driving factor was how we were gonna release the album,” says Barker when asked about the various collaborators. “We knew we were going to slowly share music as it comes in. We wanted to bring other people in for that. Also, we have tried to hide our influences and not make it look like you’re not stealing ideas from others. One day, you look into the mirror, and you realize you’re a band that’s been around for 30 years, and you just don’t care anymore. We toured with Rise Against a lot and embraced that influence. Same with Brian Baker. Clearly, we were influenced by the art these people create and by their energy and their commitment to their activism and art.”
The band ambitiously recorded eight different music videos for songs from the album, and a group of filmmakers from Brazil recorded the video for “Shallow Graves,” a song with simmering call-and-response vocals.
“The filmmakers are connected to us by INDECLINE, a global network of visual artists,” says Barker. “It runs the gamut of all formats of art. They use it to inject activism into public discourse. INDECLINE was the creative director of all of the videos, and we found people to conceptualize each one. it was a multi-national, world-wide thing to pull it off.”
Barker says the key to enacting political and social change is simply showing kindness. But given that we’re living in grim times of poverty and war, how does he manage to keep from becoming too pessimistic about the future?
“The first step is to present the ideas in a way that are hopeful and optimistic and not cynical but empathetic,” he says. “When you interact with someone, and they’re shitty to you, it’s easy to say this is over instead of doing the work you might do to know what the persona is going through and experiencing. My only advice is to lead with kindness. I know it’s cliche and not as sexy as saying, ‘We’ll burn it all down.’ I do believe it will burn to the ground if it stays on the current trajectory but I’m more interested in the optimism I see from young people. The activists are always doing what they can to alleviate suffering, and I think that is the goal of punk rock.”
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This article appears in Mar 22 – Apr 5, 2023.
