March 31 2026

Songs of Resistance and Resolve 1984-2025
Paul Metsa
MaximumFolk.com
By Grant Britt

“What are you rebelling against?” a passing bimbo asks Marlon Brando, the disaffected hoodlum leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club in the 1953 movie The Wild One.“Whatta ya got?,” Brando replies. Paul Mesa has traveled a similar path, protesting about a plethora of societal woes. His latest release, Songs of Resistance and Resolve 1984-2025, is a retrospective of just say no to ..well, whattya got?
Minnesota native Metsa has been leading his own musical rebellion since the early '80s. “Music can be a very powerful source,” Metsa says in a video interview for the Home Of the Brave, a community of Americans who speak out about the horrors suffered by people harmed by the present administration. “As social justice moves forward,” Metsa says. “It gives them something to think about, to sing along with, to dance to, and hopefully they can bring those songs, or at least the strength they get from them, into their personal fight against this fascism that we're living under right now.”

Metsa reinforces that statement with his lyrics on “Ain't Gonna Whistle Dixie Anymore, ” a powerful
statement against a repressive regime: “Fallen soldiers that were left behind, we salute on wounded
knee/Sacrifice of the highest kind, from Gettysburg to Normandy/Burn your crosses, mask your face, sing
The Appomattox Blues/Woody Guthrie told us long ago/Fascists are bound to lose, fascists born and bound
to lose.”

The singer/songwriter takes a step back in time on “Jack Ruby,” reviewing the Kennedy
assassination, focusing on the man who shot the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, asking “Was Lee
Harvey Oswald, the only one?/What of those in the bushes who started to run/With secret service
credentials and government guns/They'd answer no questions for what they had done.”
“Another Man's Chains” is a Springsteen-flavored rocker, the raspy-voice singer proclaiming that
“Nobody's got to wear another man's chains.....“You ain't got nothing without the right to be free.”
Metsa's collection of gritty, powerful anthems raging against the machine hit like a punch in the face,
a bone-shattering backlash against oppression, lifting the spirit while making a statement that can't be
ignored.

Grant Britt (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) has been writing about music since the earth cooled a while back. A staff writer for No Depression, his work also appears in BluesMusic Mag and the Greensboro News and Record. 

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