“Our publicist is challenged finding mainstream outlets,” says Mr. Whistle, the musician behind the band that bears his pseudonym. “Many won’t interview an anonymous source like me.”
Their subject matter is another barrier to mainstream press attention. Track Four on their new album is Nashville Manifesto, a song about the gender-confused rage of mass shooter Audrey Hale. If Whistle was to appear on television, “I picture Nashville going like [Jason] Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town,” he says.
Whistle has just started releasing tracks from Did You Know?, their follow-up to the 2023 6-track EP Sounding the Alarm. Produced in a professional multi track studio using the same anonymous session players as before, plus one keyboard player, the new album reprises their viral sensation She’s A Boy in the title track.
The song calls out men in women’s prisons, sports, apps, and spaces under the rubric of ‘gender identity.’ Skirt Go Spinny, the anonymous videomaker behind What is a Woman? Wrong Answers Only, made a video in cooperation with the band. “I love the collaboration with Skirt Go Spinny,” Mr. Whistle says. “Feel fortunate to have met her! She’s like part of our team.”
Already released, Track Two is “an ode” to Dylan Mulvaney, he says. Role of a Lifetime is a satirical “character sketch” of the man who unwinds at home after all day dressed as a woman.
As inspiration, Whistle credits Arty Morty for his recent essay recognizing another popular example of “immersive fiction” that has similarities to gender identity. “Kayfabe in pro wrestling. They had to be in character all the time. That’s gotta grow old,” he says. “Do these TIMs all get together and have a good laugh at our expense?” He wonders.
During the first stanza, before the subject of the song becomes clear, I was reminded of a certain Canadian wood shop teacher. By the last stanza, however, the song seemed less about Dylan in particular than the twisted incentives of the social media ‘influencer’ age. It was a hint at the lyrical depth to come in the rest of this album.
Mr. Whistle has been “performing since high school” in the 1970s. He released his first album on cassette in 1982. Since then, he has pressed “about 16 more records” that were “always DIY, never a label, or real fan base to speak of.” He kept his day job and made music as passion.
He also mastered an eclectic range of styles. “I’ve been a labor troubadour/folk singer,” he says. “I’ve done solo singer songwriter gigs and albums. I’ve fronted a punk rock tribute band.”
Do You Know? exhibits his range. Track Three, Enemies List, is a country song about the counterproductive nature of cancel culture (“this is not a good way to make your case”). The sixth track, Pronoun Police, owes something to Bob Seger’s Old Time Rock And Roll.
“Most of my albums exhibit this variety of styles. I try to write to the song. The variety is intentional,” he says. “I always liked guys like John Hiatt, Steve Earle, Bruce Cockburn, Tom Petty. Can go soft AND rock hard.”
Nashville Manifesto, the fourth track, took a long time to get right. “The first bit was written quickly. It had many important rewrites. I used details we knew, it tries to be journalistic,” Mr. Whistle says.
Hale was “taking revenge on something she didn’t understand,” he sings. Explaining the lyric, he says “I don’t find her sympathetic, but there’s a pathos to her madness, By that I meant her rage seemed senseless to me. It obviously made strange sense to her.”
Rather than focus altogether on “her strange hatred of the cis hetero normative paradigm,” Whistle sings “the unspoken story,” he says. The song is about “how Woke oppression politics can turn privilege into a capital crime.”
Whistle stays current on these issues. Where to Find My Heart, a father’s lament for an ROGD daughter, is inspired by the PITT Parents stories in Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids.
Asked his opinion on the ‘trans kids’ phenomenon, Whistle sees “so many intertwined cultural threads.” The decline of youth music culture is one such thread, and like social media, it is technology-driven. “I always resented deejays who got as big as actual musicians,” he says. “The real instruments in this record make it sound archaic.”
Once upon a time, an album like Do You Know? might have become a sensation through the radio broadcasting of Dr. Demento, who is now 83. Radio show syndication is a rump industry. Today’s kids are getting their music through Tiktok on a phone that accesses more information than their brains can hold.
Some trends that seemed innocent enough as music culture have become downright sinister as ‘queer culture.’
“I believe ‘Trans’ is partly an outgrowth of tattoos, piercing, branding” etcetera, he argues. These fads “certainly smoothed the way” because they “normalized radical body modification. It’s just one of many confluent forces.”
What to do about it all? Whistle offers his personal answer in the powerful seventh track, Listen Up Men. A folk song featuring a fiddle and a mandolin, it is an appeal to stop treating manhood as ‘toxic’ and a problem to be fixed.
“Songs are like children, you love them all differently,” Mr. Whistle says. Asked which track on the album is his favorite, he hesitates. “The lead track” — Do You Know? —”is definitely stuck in my head.”
But he confesses a weakness for the final track, My Gal, which is about his cat, Little Whistler. He admits the connection to gender identity controversies may not be readily apparent.
A cat does not fret about ‘who I really am.’ A cat simply is. It knows no other way of being than life as a cat. Humans are the only animals who get upset about what they are and then try to become something they are not.
Although one man forms the core of the band, “Mrs Whistle gives me song prompts and lyrical feedback,” he says. Collaboration is his real jam. “I love what my players did with my songs. What a joy for a songwriter.” He was also pleased to have Mr. Menno make the band’s album trailer.
“Is there enough material for a third whistle Project? Probably. I want to write a song from the detrans” perspective, he says.
When the gender balloon runs out of air, the Whistle discography will become a novelty act, an artifact of a strange time in history. “Let’s hope” for that outcome, Whistle says. “I’d rather go back to normal life.”