Victor V. Gurbo captures a modern protest cry on new single ‘The Ballad of Renée Nicole Good’
Victor V. Gurbo approaches ‘The Ballad of Renée Nicole Good’ with the stark directness of traditional American protest music. Built around cello, acoustic and electric guitar, the song responds to the fatal shooting of Renée Nicole Macklin Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this year, turning the event into a deliberately confrontational piece of contemporary folk.
His writing leaves very little distance between us and the story he's telling. Names, locations and specific moments are used throughout, giving the track the documentary quality associated with older murder ballads and topical folk songs. That approach makes the song uncomfortable by design: delivered as a piece written to preserve a particular event and the anger surrounding it.
Musically, the arrangement remains disciplined. Gurbo’s voice and acoustic guitar establish the folk foundation, while Mark Caserta’s electric guitar adds a rougher edge and Katie Chambers’ cello brings an additional layer of gravity. The relative sparseness allows the narrative to remain dominant without reducing the recording to little more than a musical statement.
The singer-songwriter clearly draws from the lineage of politically engaged American songwriting, but ‘The Ballad of Renée Nicole Good’ isn't attempting to recreate the sound of the 60s wholesale. It uses the familiar mechanics of the protest ballad to address an event firmly rooted in the present.
Severe, mournful and deliberately uncompromising, ‘The Ballad of Renée Nicole Good’ finds Victor V. Gurbo treating songwriting as testimony, by using a familiar folk form to ensure that, in his telling, one life and one moment are not allowed to disappear quietly.
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