New York City, and Cambridge-based trio Bold Forbes has released a new example of their singer/songwriter and chamber-Folk hybrid with their single, “Make Away,” out now. The song asks: “Could the daily sweetness of life ever merge with the struggle for a better, more just world?” 

In an interview with The Bluegrass Situation, Nick Bloom said about the track:

I wrote ‘Make Away’ after a dinner party I attended in Austin, TX, some years back. I left the party feeling like ‘this is why one stays alive,’ but also I somehow mistrusted this feeling. What kinds of lives and labor went into producing the food we ate that night, how fragile was the peace that allowed us to meet so joyously and cavalierly, and how long would it last?

I traveled to the central valley of California on a road trip the summer before—where so much of that night’s food came from—and the rows and rows of crops seem to stretch forever in all directions away from you on that flat, hot road. Billboards line the highway with propaganda advertisements from the farm owners lobbying for more water from the state, with photographs of ‘family farmers’—inevitably blond, white, crisp-collared people. Of course, very few of the thousands of workers working the rows of crops fit that description: people being criminally underpaid for doing the hardest work in the country and then being rhetorically savaged every day by this country’s citizens who profit and benefit from this work.

Fellow band members David Halpern and Reid Jenkins arranged and added key elements to “Make Away.” The band recorded the song in Reid’s apartment in New York City, and Reid acted as Producer, engineer and editor. Chris Connors mixed, and Nick Bolton mastered the song.