Kristen Ford is leaping into a white man’s rock dream — on the wings of a Righteous Babe.
“White Man’s Dream” is the new single from Ford, a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter who has made a name for herself since 2014 as a DIY touring act, including regular performances in New Haven clubs like Cafe Nine. She’s best known on stage for mastering the one-person band trick, laying loops of insistent rhythm guitar and flashy leads with vocals and rock-out drumming.
Now she has caught her break. Ford’s musical hero and role model, Ani DiFranco, caught a Ford show last year in Provincetown’s Waydowntown club. They struck up a conversation — and made a deal. DiFranco invited Ford to her studio in New Orleans to record the “White Man’s Dream” single. Not a DIY single. A professionally produced recording on DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label, with DiFranco providing the dominant bass line (on synth).
Raise your glass to the golden Mississippi
And God bless a southern man
How quickly you forget my great great grandmother
She died picking cotton on stolen land
Sometimes I wish I was a boy
So I could check off all the boxes like they wanted
Not a master or a slave, guess I’m something in between
I’m a girl sleepwalking in white man’s dream
I’m a girl sleepwalking in some white man’s dream
The song begins with that sense of limitation. Over the years Ford has wrestled with the challenge of emerging as a raw-rock songwriter pursuing that “white man’s dream.” On the one hand she organized and participated in all-female line-up shows; on the other hand the shows were never billed that way. They were singer-songwriter or solo performer nights. They weren’t “grrls rock” or “female singer-songwriter” nights. The point: Include sidelined performers without identifying them as other than the norm.
But the story doesn’t end there. “White Man’s World” pivots to an anthemic call to liberation, including for girls, and everyone else, growing, like Ford, outside the boundaries of the gender/racial/sexual mainstream.
Rainbow babes
You can change your names
If the pronouns don’t fit right
Jesus saves
He said love the little children
Nah, you don’t have to fit in
‘Cause they’re all ones and zeroes
And in you is a hero
After recording the single and completing the animated video (with cameo caricatures of Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz), Ford accompanied DiFranco on a 12-city tour. She opened the shows. She also sometimes rejoined DiFranco onstage at the end to play together. It was the rock dream she’d always pursued, outside the white man rocker confines that, until seven minutes ago, Jann Wenner had imposed on the industry.
“We had a female tour manager. We had a female sound engineer calling the shots on how the trailer’s getting loaded. It was a half female crew,” Ford said Thursday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “It’s nice to just feel like it’s not a boy’s club. It’s an everyone’s club. More and more people who are buying guitars and who are wanting to rock out and make their mark, it’s not a boy’s club anymore. It can be an everybody’s club.”
On tour with DiFranco, Ford found that the youngest crowd members at the all-ages show particularly connected to her new song. That reinforced the song’s hopeful message.
“There are so many young people who are feeling very free about who they want to be in this world and in this world. Race and gender — it’s like, ‘Let’s all just chill out and focus on connection and helping each other and finding commonalities and finding common ground,’” Ford said.
Won’t you check one box
Won’t you choose one race
Well I’m a mixed girl rockin’ on a white man’s stage
You could be queer, trans , straight, whatever
Maybe in between
You could be a girl sleepwaking in a white man’s dream
Next up: Ford returns to the studio with DiFranco to complete a full album. And from there? The world has no boundaries.
Click on the above podcast for the full conversation with Kristen Ford on WNHH FM’s Dateline New Haven. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.
