Low Cut Connie’s ‘Livin’ in the USA’ Brings Protest and Party Together

For Adam Weiner, the question isn’t whether to voice frustration, but how. Arriving around Independence Day, the Philadelphia songwriter’s new album as Low Cut Connie, Livin’ in the USA, answers with ten tracks of rock and soul that refuse to separate protest from pleasure. The record’s title track opens with a line of quiet alienation — “Livin’ in the USA, but it ain’t my home” — written in response to what Weiner calls the current administration’s assault on citizens. But the mood across the album, Weiner says, pulls from a deeper source: the Fred Rogers doctrine. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” he quoted to Rolling Stone, using it not as therapy but as ignition. “We’ve got to use it to motivate us.”

That motivation didn’t sit well with everyone around him. Weiner let go of a team member who warned that the song could damage his career. The decision was personal. “I have to look in the mirror every day and feel good about what I’m doing,” he said. The record itself carries that same insistence, balancing moments of weariness with the kind of uplift he associates with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and Sly and the Family Stone’s social commentary. “We can reclaim joy and protest at the same time,” Weiner said. On Livin’ in the USA, that’s less a slogan than a working method — rock and roll as a room where anger and release don’t have to be strangers.