Dropkick Murphys fielding cuts from all albums on tour coming to Cedar Rapids

Roughly 20 years ago, the Dropkick Murphys band was contacted by Nora Guthrie, daughter of legendary folk troubadour Woody Guthrie, and invited to look through some of the unpublished lyrics that remained in the Guthrie family’s the possession.

Nora Guthrie’s son had become a fan of the band, and Nora recognized the Dropkick Murphys’ working-class views closely paralleled those of her late father’s. Soon, a friendship began forming.

The band jumped at the opportunity to visit the Guthrie archives, and gained permission from Nora to write music to two of Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics. The first song, “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight,” from the 2003 Dropkick Murphys album “Blackout,” didn’t gain much notice.

The second song, however, was a game changer for the band. “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” was featured in director Martin Scorsese’s 2006 Oscar-winning film, “The Departed.” It propelled the Dropkick Murphys to national fame and started the band on a path to becoming hometown heroes in Boston, the city where the band formed in 1996 and remains its home base.

At the time frontman Ken Casey and his Dropkick Murphys bandmates were invited to peruse Guthrie’s unseen lyrics, they started kicking around the notion of making a full album of songs written around Guthrie’s lyrics.

But the idea sat idle for two decades as the band stayed plenty busy making albums of original material and touring extensively worldwide. Then after releasing the its 10th album, 2021’s “Turn Up That Dial,” the opportunity to revisit the Guthrie album idea knocked.

“We hit 10 studio albums as a band, and it felt like it was time to do something that stretched our wings a little bit,” Casey said in a late-September phone interview. “But also, just the lyrics are kind of eerily apropos to what’s going on in the world right now, whether you want to talk about workers fighting for a fair wage, take the auto workers strike or anything else that’s going on in the world where workers are starting to (rise up).

“The wage gap has grown dramatically and it’s really time for workers to organize again the way they did in the 1930s America, and just grab back their share of the pie because it’s just not sustainable,” he said. “I was reading a thing about a certain house here. ... In the 1990s it was $105,000 and now that same house is $500,000. But a teacher was making $50,000 in the 1990s and now they’re only making $55,000. (With) a $5,000 pay increase, how do you afford a house that’s gone up $400,000? So it was very timely in that regard.

“And then obviously, we’re pretty open about our politics and our disdain for MAGA America and basically the rise in fascism and the rise in the acceptance — the willingness — to have an authoritarian leader as our president. It’s just something that would have Woody rolling over in his grave,” the singer said.

“To ever think it would be going on (now) on the overpasses of our highways and everything, and having our politicians not even denounce it, it’s just a perfect storm of things we felt were important to dig into Woody’s message and bring it to the public.”

So the band — Casey (lead vocals), Tim Brennan (guitar/accordion/piano), Jeff DaRosa (guitar, banjo, mandolin), Matt Kelly (drums), James Lynch (guitar) and Kevin Rheault (bass) — headed to Tulsa, Okla., home of the Woody Guthrie Center museum and not far from Guthrie’s birthplace of Okemah, Okla., and set up shop at Church Studio, a legendary facility opened by the late Leon Russell.

Although the Dropkick Murphys are famous for a rowdy, fully plugged-in Irish-accented punk sound, the band members decided to use acoustic instruments and crafted a more textured — but still plenty energetic — sound to go with Guthrie’s lyrics.

“It was time to give something a change,” Casey said of the acoustic approach. “But we also felt like we wanted to be able to show that we’re better musicians and songwriters and song crafters than maybe people sometimes think of when they think of Dropkick Murphys.”

Listeners have had ample opportunity to check out the band’s skills. The recording session yielded 20 songs, which were split into two albums: the 2022 release “This Machine Still Kills Fascists,” and “Okemah Rising,” released in May.

After doing a tour of seated theaters last fall to support “This Machine Still Kills Fascists,” the Dropkick Murphys will plug back in for this fall’s tour, coming to the Alliant Energy PowerHouse in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023.

Casey said the show isn’t quite as focused on “This Machine” (named after the “This Machine Kills Fascists” creed Guthrie adorned to his guitar in the 1940s) and “Okemah Rising.”

“I would say it’s probably like three songs off of ‘This Machine,’ probably four off of ‘Okemah’ and basically going three or four off of every (other) record,” he said, “just trying to make a set that kind of encompasses the whole career.”