Spotlight Album Review: Diana Jones "Song to a Refugee"

As a young artist raised in New York Diana Jones leaned heavily into rock, but after learning that her birth family was from Appalachia, she discovered her voice as a songwriter and singer. The flowering of that was My Remembrance of You in 2006, which led to critical acclaim and five subsequent albums.  Her newest, Song to a Refugee, is her strongest yet for the clarity of her vision and the depth of her writing.

Song to a Refugee followed a fallow period when Diana had health problems and writer’s block. The impetus came when she ran into Emma Thompson twice in the park in NYC. They ended up bonding over the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexican border, and Thompson mentioned a London-based human rights organization that works with asylum seekers.  Diana soon found her breakthrough.

Often drawing on press photos, she was able to humanize the situation. “El Chaparral” tells of migrant children making the journey alone. “Santiago” is a boy whose mother has entrusted to a man, not his father, for safety. In “Where We Are” a seven-year-old with the number 47 pinned on his shirt is searching for his parents.  

“Ask a Woman” stems from a story Elizabeth Warren heard from woman who was threatened by a gang member and decided to walk to the U.S. border with her child in her arms. “If you really want to know answers to the question that’s keeping us apart these days,” the song goes, “ask the woman with the child in her arms.” 

The migrant crisis isn’t confined to the U.S. and Mexico, of course.  “I Will Wait for You” describes a woman whose father sold her to a husband in Sudan is at a detention center in the U.K. trying to establish her status before sending for her children. In “The Sea is My Mother,” two sisters are waiting at a detention center in Lesbos; one leaves and the other stays. “Love Song to a Bird” imagines being a refugee in a leaky boat with birds flying overhead with “no thought of where we land, no country, no borders.”

“Humble” speaks of Diana’s personal experience trying to recover from a gas leak in her apartment: “Life made you humble/All the living and dying/The coming and going/And the way we keep trying.”   There’s a resilience there, which clearly she identifies with, along with her empathy. Throughout, she sings in her Southern-inflected, plain-spoken way, counting on the poetry of the songs to convey the drama of their situation.

The multi-instrumentalist David Mansfield (known for his work with Bob Dylan, Loudon Wainwright, Bobby McFerrin, and countless others) keeps the production organic, deploying a multitude of his own stringed instruments, along with bassist Jason Sypher and Diana’s guitar. Credits also include Richard Thompson on guitar on “I Will Wait for You” and the Chapin Sisters on “Ask a Woman.”

The marquee cameos occur in the standout track, “We Believe You,” which features guest vocals by Thompson, Steve Earle, and Peggy Seeger, all of whom are Diana’s friends. The song was added after the album was initially recorded, after reports of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s visit to a detention center in Texas. “I believed the women,” AOC said, inspiring an anthem worthy of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger: “We believe there is no difference between you and me/We believe you came for asylum/We believe you want to live in peace.”      

At a time when truth remains controversial and compassion is called for more than ever, Diana has created an album both topical and timeless and well deserving to be the Spotlight Album of the Month.