“All the good we could have done
Could have done for everyone
Is this the land of the setting sun
Have we forgotten who we were
And why we came here anyway
So pick up the reins and kick the spur
Shackled and shamed and stripped of its voice
Left in a corner to suffer the noise
Made by corporate thugs and their fat City boy
Being sick on their wealth like they hadn’t a choice”
- From Spiritual America by Duke Special
I reckon that this is Duke Special’s most powerful moment, from perhaps his most satisfying work to date Under The Dark Cloth. Writing with one of England’s finest living songwriters Boo Hewerdine has done his Dukeness no harm and this project of writing to photographs in a gallery with an orchestra as baking brings out the art if Duke perfectly. Spiritual America is a political spiritual piece of beautiful Semtex. The lyrics probe deep into the heart of the American soul and paint an accurate but bleak picture of the state of a nation founded on so much better ideals and dreams that most people’s reality of it today, inside or outside the country. For Duke it is a spiritual issue and he is right. The Pilgrim Fathers came with a spiritual dream and in the drama created by the strings on this recording we might be in the last days of the spiritual nightmare that was gotten to somehow! Greed, bankers, selfishness, gracelessness... Duke squeezes them all in. A sad and powerful piece!