“I had several friends and loved ones die this year. Trans people often don’t get any say in what we leave behind and it occurred to me that I’m creeping up to our average life expectancy. This seemed like a way to have at least something out there that is on my terms, come what may.”
Taryn Kody of Orlando agit-folkies X Dirty Fingers is, indeed, a bit on the young side to have a songbook out, but as anyone who has witnessed one of her live shows can attest, she has a lot of things to say —- angry words, funny words, sad words, joyous words, utopian words.
Many of these words have just been collected in Kody’s lyric chapbook-as-memoir One Day These Hands Will Tear You Down, out this week.
One Day … compiles years’ worth of Kody’s lyrics with X Dirty Fingers, her duo project with Ali, as well as early (and more recent) poetry. Rather than being a collected works–type “final statement,” we can’t help but interpret it as Kody writing the final chapter on her life in Orlando, before she leaves Florida early next year.
Though she has several recordings out (easily found on Bandcamp) and now a lyric book, X Dirty Fingers’ music is best experienced live. A joyful hoot and holler of old-time folk — think Harry Smith’s Anthology, not the Avett Brothers — through dual lenses of crust-punk and Marxism, this is not a po-faced lecture, but a cathartic and happy yell that there is a way out of this capitalist trap.
Kody’s of a lineage of artists going back to the fiery likes of Hazel Dickens, AJJ, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs — performers who were unafraid to espouse Marxist, pro-worker, anti-capitalist rhetoric in urgently tuneful terms.
(Sidenote: Too much Boomer rockist rewriting of history casts Pete Seeger as the overly earnest fuddy-duddy trying to stifle the electrified cool of Bob Dylan. Just imagine if Seeger, ax a-swingin’, had cut the power cables during Dylan’s electrified set at Newport. How much of the 1960s industrial-nostalgia complex we would have been spared?)
Kody is conscious of being part of a lineage, covering songs from the likes of Guthrie and early Bruce Springsteen live; even this book is partly an acknowledgment.
“I like when songwriters release lyrics as poetry, like Bill Callahan’s I Drive a Valence. Ferlinghetti’s Poetry as Insurgent Art and the Barks translations of Rumi were big for finding a tone that floats between poem, song and manifesto,” she says. “And Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues doesn’t have much in common with my writing formally, but spiritually, I’m just copying [Feinberg].”
One Day … contains a manifesto, lyrics to over 35 songs, and even more poetry — covering a decade of creative work from 2014-2024. The music is all readily available, but this is the first time her poetry has been collected and properly released.
“I knew it was going to be excruciating going through my old poems to see what to save and what to drop into total obscurity. What surprised me was how much of it I ended up keeping. Also how prophetic some of it was … ‘Dystopia: Dancefloor’ was written after the Pulse shooting but now rereading it, it seems like it’s about the George Floyd summer or the repression of pro-Palestine protests in the past year,” Kody recalls. “I don’t know if this is encouraging or not, but whatever happens in the coming years, people have survived and resisted similar in the past. We’re all stitches in the big pattern, and our elders have a lot of lessons to teach.”
Kody’s wordplay is deft, shifting from dense remembrances full of intensely personal references, memories, and places recognizable to Orlandoans to minimalist polemics on the capitalist disease. Tributes to Daniel Johnston and anti-landlord screeds share space with the impossibly naked love song “Palomita.”
Something worth pointing out is, much like her folk elders’, Kody’s wickedly funny sense of humor. There’s a wink and a bite in there that’s essential in navigating the workaday world. Rousing sing-alongs of “Steal From Your Boss” — an exhortation on the mandatory nature of some good ol’ workplace pilfering — are a highlight of XDF sets.
“‘Steal From Your Boss’ is probably my most famous song. I have met people in other parts of the country who know the words,” says Kody. “Which is strange because I cut it from our album, so there’s no recordings out. I thought it was bad, but it speaks to people even though it’s more of an Instagram post–level explanation of the Marxist theory of value than lyrics. Maybe that’s why it speaks to people. ‘Terminator 2’ is the best I’ve done in terms of just saying exactly what I mean.”
As befits Kody’s restless work ethic, there are more than a few chances to see X Dirty Fingers and solo sets before she leaves. “The book is releasing on the 14th at Barley and Vine at Renee Arozqueta’s Folk Night with Jason Earle and the Ladybits, and I’m playing a set too,” she says. “I’m also doing a long set at Audubon Market on the 23rd [from] 6-8 p.m. Those are both free. The band I songwrite in, X Dirty Fingers, is playing two house shows on the 20th and the 23rd, DM @xdirtyfingers on Instagram for locations. The 20th is a food and blanket drive for Food Not Bombs.”
You can also nab a copy locally of One Day … at Maitland comic shop Blackbird Comics.
January sees a swing through Florida with June Henry, and then Taryn Kody closes the book on Orlando.
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Related events
Audubon Park Community Market
Mondays, 6 p.m.
Location: Stardust Video and Coffee, 1842 E. Winter Park Road, Orlando
This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.