Brett Newski - Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down (2020)

Vietnam doesn’t seem like much of a refuge, but for Brett Newski where else do you go when you’ve lost your job, your band, and your girl? After writing over one hundred songs during six months of solo touring in Southeast Asia, the Milwaukeean returned to the states with a vengeance, recording and touring over 200 nights a year. Now, in a radically different landscape, he’s released Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down.

Serious and sardonic, Newski looks at the world through eyes jaded by years of disappointment and lies. Last Dance starts with the subtle strums of an acoustic guitar, yet before you know it he’s in the midst of a full force rave-up singing, “I ain’t trying to build the ark, I just really wanna learn how to swim thru a sea of plastic bottles, all the refuse, the mess we’re in.”

As befits a singer whose website advertises a previous album with the heartwarming admonition, “…even if you don’t like the songs you can use the disc as a Frisbee…” Clearly, he does not take himself too seriously. Yet, sometimes being serious is his stock and trade. Like when he finds us glued to screens instead of tied to the planet. Newski suggests, “If I was the dirt beneath the sneakers on your soulless feet, I’d nudge you far from the mirage so you could see the water.”

In an age when commonsense is in short supply, his website also displays Newski clobbering someone walking down the street for their toilet paper. The four-note riff of No Self Control belies a lyric hitting at the heart of our modern conundrum, “I gotta relax, I gotta let go, the more I think, the less I know.”

From his years on the road and the seemingly endless series of shows, Newski has learned how to turn a phrase. Over sounds of an acoustic guitar, he recounts one of those moments that make artists question whether anything still makes sense. “I passed a Hobo down on Pekin, he was looking so much cooler than me.”

Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down Brett Newski tells us. And we live in a world where the bastards are everywhere. Brett Newski does not want to be the only reasonable voice in these unreasonable times. Join him in the march…in a socially distant and responsible way.