Songs that straight-up tell you they’re about America are tricky. They can veer so easily into grandstanding or cliché. The ones that don’t — the songs that say something real and honest about the United States — are often sad and conflicted. Then we as listeners overlook those darker aspects in our collective memory in order to make said songs more easily enjoyable at 4th of July barbecues. This irony isn’t new.
What’s fresh about Rainbow Girls’ “American Dream” is how poignantly the North Bay trio captures the changing shape of this country’s broken promises — without soapboxing. This song knocks the wind out of me. Vulnerability, stubborn hope and deep, overwhelming grief all leak through the spaces between the words and the harmonies and the fingerpicked guitar.
The band wrote “American Dream” five years ago; it’s the title track from an album they released November 8, 2017. When I first heard it — a year after the election that, fittingly, knocked the wind out of so many of us — it made me cry. It tapped so perfectly into that feeling of being robbed.
But of course I had also spent much of 2017 feeling stupid, and privileged, for thinking anything had ever been guaranteed. To those of us who graduated high school around 9/11 (kicking off decades of war) and entered the job market during a historic recession (all while basic costs of living continued to skyrocket), adult life had been one instance after another of the bottom dropping out. Why should we expect anything different?
Five years later, now with a live version and warm, intimate video recorded at the band’s Bodega home, this song still makes me cry — for all the same reasons and also some new ones.
