It’s been two weeks since Ken Casey flew across the North Atlantic Ocean, traveling over 4,000 miles to Warsaw, Poland, where he joined an aid group to drive first responder equipment into Ukraine. “We were donating ambulances [and] fire engines… because the Russians will target civilians working in those vehicles,” he tells me, from his home in Massachusetts. “I think they say an ambulance lasts an average of 11 days,” he says, explaining that Russians are ambushing injured victims attempting to seek medical help.
Over three years have passed since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. For many, the war has faded to the back of the American subconscious. But for Ken, whose band, Dropkick Murphys, has toured extensively throughout Eastern Europe—“a lot of Ukrainians come to our shows, even as the war’s going on”—he wanted to “let them know that not all of us have stopped supporting them.” The band has also been raising money via sales of T-shirts with “WE STAND WITH UKRAINE” emblazoned on the back. “I view it as a fight that would, in some way or another, end up on America’s doorstep,” he says.
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“It sucks that America is so divided. It sucks that, even now, the music scene is divided. You know there’s a problem when the punk scene is divided. You know there’s a problem when people are shocked and angry that a punk band is speaking up against an authoritarian and a billionaire. That’s the world we live in.”
Since the beginning, Dropkicks take the anti-establishment “punk” part of Celtic-punk seriously. And with Ken as the band’s literal and figurative mouthpiece—regularly speaking out at live shows, including the now infamous March concert where he told a MAGA hat-wearing fan, “There are no kings here!”—you’ll never doubt where they stand on issues of democracy.
But if you ever had a question, their new album For the People (releasing July 4), is a powerful and invigorating call to action designed to incite awareness and reclaim the power of the people. The album title is directly inspired by the band’s ongoing ethos: “We’re passionate about workers’ rights. We’re passionate about people being treated fairly. That’s why we thought the name of the album, For the People, summed it up,” Ken says. “What it all boils down to, in this day and age, it really comes down to the same old thing of class struggle.”
“Who’ll Stand With Us?”—the first single—isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s a call for unity:
Who’ll stand with us?
Don’t tell us everything is fine
Who’ll stand with us?
Because this treatment is a crime
The working people fuel the engine
While you yank the chain
We fight the wars and build buildings
For someone else’s gain
Billy Bragg joins the band on their cover of Ewan MacColl’s “School Days Are Over.”
“Dropkick Murphys has always been inspired by the protest singer,” Ken says. “Whether it was Woody Guthrie, whether it was Irish folk musicians, whether it was Joe Strummer, and Billy Bragg being one of the great modern-day protest singers, we always drew inspiration from him.”
DKM bandmate Al Barr, who has taken time off from the band for family reasons, joins Ken on vocals on the spirited “The Vultures Circle High.” Irish bands the Mary Wallopers and the Scratch also feature on the album, the latter contributing to the closing track, “One Last Goodbye,” a tearful tribute to the Pogue’s Shane MacGowan.
“I feel like when you think about Shane MacGowan, you think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s gone,’ and then, at the same time you go, ‘Oh, I can’t believe he lasted as long as he did, either.’ It’s kind of two different ways of looking at it. That particular song was more [of a] tribute to Shane from my own personal experience with him. Whether going to Pogues shows when I was young, or how the Pogues made my whole life seem to make sense like, ‘Oh, wow. What a weird world that I am in musically that I like these two forms of music, old people folk music, and punk rock,’ but suddenly this band has come along in my mid-teens and captured everything that my life seems to be about.”
DKM toured with the Pogues in 2005; Shane MacGowan is featured on the band’s 2001 song “The Wild Rover.” In March of 2024, Dropkicks were among the artists paying tribute to Sinéad O’Connor and MacGowan in concert at Carnegie Hall.
“I feel like it really encompasses a lot of our lives,” Ken says of For the People. “Streetlights,” the album’s ninth track, is about the day his father died when he was a boy. “I never thought I’d write a song about that,” he says. “I just guess I wasn’t prepared to. Something brought up a feeling one day and that song just came out of me. You never know what [stories are] still left to come out.”
No matter how loud they are, and they are loud, the band has an undeniable soft side. Or maybe, better put, a side that’s consistently for the people. Since 2009, The Claddagh Fund—a charitable foundation founded by Ken—has been raising money “for the most underfunded non-profit organizations that support the vulnerable populations in our communities.” Annual golf tournaments and a kid-friendly midday mini-concert are among the family-focused fundraising initiatives. Longtime supporters of veterans, last month the band performed in Washington D.C. at the “Unite for Veterans, Unite for America” rally. According to the Unite For Veterans site: “On June 6th, thousands of veterans, military families, and their allies rallied on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Unite for Veterans, Unite for America Rally. We came together to defend the benefits, jobs, and dignity that every generation of veterans has earned through sacrifice. Veteran jobs, healthcare, and essential VA services are under attack. We will not stand by.”
“We will always do what we do and what we believe in,” Ken says.
And that, inevitably, brings us back to the all-important role of creating music for our times. “The very first line of the very first song of our very first album was political,” Ken says. “You fast-forward almost 30 years at this point, and I look back at it and say, ‘Man, all that seemed like pre-season or a dry run for where we’re at now.’ To put our heads down now would be [doing] a disservice to everything the band’s ever been about.
“Say what you will,” he adds, “but I’ve always had the same haircut and the same politics this whole time.”
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