"My soul has grown deep like the rivers." — Langston Hughes

I am proud to present my second full-length album, River Rouge.

River Rouge is an album about a river that begins at Zug Island in Detroit, MI, wending its way around the world before returning to Southeast Michigan.

Named after the Ford River Rouge Complex, this album captures the feelings of an alienated and overworked American caught in the midst of two major, heavily related historical changes: the post-9/11 acceleration of American imperialism and the abandoment of the American working class.

River Rouge is a modern entry into the American canon of "river music." A long and circuitous listen, River Rouge charts a course downstream through the dark heart of a country that never should have been as it revels in its own putrescence. Along the way, the listener can moor their little boat at varied medicine shows and burning villages and take in the wondrous panorama, all brought to you without commercial interruption by our aggrieved and stunted captains of industry.

This river tour exhibits a spiritually impoverished country in decline — its prime industry is weaponry and mass surveillance ("Murder"); its religion is prosperity without shame ("You're Free"); it embraces slopaganda and revels in mass psychosis ("Land of Plenty"); and it wields military-grade surveillance and weaponry against its own citizens ("Imperial Boomerang"). Worse yet, many recognize that this has always been our national character, and the literature that hoped for more, or believed in some truer, purer American spirit has turned out to be nothing more than a nice dream ("The Country").

River Rouge is as subtle and productive as a brick through a window, as coherent as a madman with a razor. It is an unbashed, self-righteous jeremiad. I own its ridiculousness.

But underneath all of this fervor, I promise, is nothing less than the shattered heart of someone who dreamed America could ever be rehabilitated.

About seventy-five years ago, my father was drafted into the US Army to serve in the Korean War, one of the US's many proxies of the Cold War. He never talked about it much, unsurprisingly, and I never got the sense that he had a fully coherent opinion about his own service and its value, let alone about the rationale and nature of the war. But I could glean, over time, that his perspective on war had been profoundly shaped by the things he'd seen. He, for instance, vehemently opposed the 2004 unilateral invasion of Iraq, which fully turned him against George W. Bush (whom he had voted for). He did not want a military burial. He did not proudly display his medals — they sat amongst many piles of papers and debris just under the dining room telephone. He did not seem to keep in touch with or socialize with other veterans. 

There was some melancholy about him that could have come from any number of sources — his life was defined by tragedy and regret. If I'm being honest, I will never be able to claim that I knew my father well. I have to guess at a lot. But what this all communicated to me was that this man was never meant to carry a rifle around and he regretted, perhaps, that he ever did.

After the war, he worked in the auto industry for three decades with Ford and Chrysler. Amidst the slow collapse of Detroit in the 1980s, he was forced into early retirement. Years later, Chrysler cut his retiree health benefits just a few months before his diagnosis with bladder cancer at the age of 80. He spent most of his last years sinking into alcoholism and poverty, trying to stave off medical-related debt. He died shortly after an aggressive cancer surgery in 2013, a surgery that had a low probability of success and which was probably at least partially motivated by our fee-for-service healthcare system.

The title track on this album is sung from two perspectives, his and mine.

First, there is my own perspective, that of a despairing high school English teacher who watches the 24/7 stream of propaganda and slop rip the last shreds of autonomy and literacy away from the American public. I have no frame of reference anymore for our politics or our pop culture, which seem to have become one and the same. I fear for my safety and for the security of my rights as a member of a targeted community. My fingers become more tentative when typing publically visible ideas like these for fear they'll threaten my livelihood and safety. Humanitarian principles I used to believe were basic and shared by many now have become conveniently ignored to prop up a myriad of chauvinisms and, worse, to rationalize mass murder. In many ways I am also quite lucky, privileged, and happy, and the dissonance between the amount of joy I experience each day and the condition of the world has me in a perpetual state of vertigo.

The second perspective belongs to my father, an alcoholic war veteran with cancer, sitting at a bill-laden dining room table in a filthy and dilapitated house, smoking cigarettes and watching cable news. This is a voice of profound self doubt and fear, a voice of generational melancholy, passed down to me and my siblings. It's the voice of someone who, staring at his own imminent death, must have come to question the goodness of the country he fought for and lived in his entire life.

But, in the latter years of his life, this is also a man who expressed profound faith in his children and never stopped encouraging us to pursue a life of art, sacrifice, selflessness, and virtue. I don't know if I can ever say with confidence that he was a good father, but I know now that he didn't want us to become helpless cogs in the terrible machine of American life. He wanted us to take care of each other. And maybe he wanted us to fight back in a way that he was never really able to.

River Rouge is my attempt to do just that. 

Taking up this fight is, in some way, a foolish endeavor; I express an awareness of my own foolishness throughout the album in a hopeless, cynical, and downtrodden voice. Probably no one will listen to this album. No one will read these words. No one will absorb these lyrics or think deeply about them. No one will sing these songs. They will motivate no one to action. These songs will fill no one's belly, will liberate no one. They will not be blown from horns on a battlefield. They will not be sung in a march to the Capitol. The era in which change can be made through that kind of coordinated action, or in which art could escape containment, is likely over, as our every interaction is surveilled, as every piece of data we willingly volunteer over to our capitalist overlords becomes wielded against us, a liability tattooed onto the all-encompassing skin of the internet. We'll lose the war. The tree will die. What is left in the wake of these terrible epiphanies? I'm afraid I'm not sure, but this album at least attempts to be honest about these conditions, to name them, and to give tone to the alienation many of us feel. Like Leonard Cohen once sang, "I'm a fool, but I think I can heal it with this song." 

Perhaps someday, things will be different. Until then, we float on our little skiff down River Rouge, waiting to find a shore of hospitality. "Oh, look at that river flow!"

—TG

River Rouge was written and recorded in Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, PA in 2024 and 2025. It was co-produced by Billy Durette, who also plays keyboards and piano on several tracks. The album also features contributions from saxophonist Matt Douglas of The Mountain Goats (“The Country”); bassist Christopher Griffiths of Will Hoge (several tracks); and pianist Garen Nigon, the artist’s husband (“Land of Plenty”). 

River Rouge will be released independently on January 23rd, 2026.

Tracklist:

1. The Hum (Theme from River Rouge)

2. Murder

3. The Heart of America

4. You’re Free

5. Hackensack

6. Waves on the Shore

7. Hum II: A Grand Cross for Ford

8. Hum III: Crystal River

9. Hum IV: Return to Zug Island

10. Widow’s Walk

11. Imperial Boomerang

12. Land of Plenty

13. The Country

14. River Rouge