Dave Alvin at L.A. Times Magazine

See "Troubadour of Troubled Times":

Over the course of roughly three decades, Alvin has compiled one of the great, if underappreciated, California songbooks, cataloging the people and places most overlook or choose to ignore.

His is not the confectionary California of endless summers and Hollywood glitter or the kooky capital of New Age seekers and sunbaked hedonists. Alvin sings of life on the margins and between the cracks, of farm workers and illegal immigrants, of meth heads and lost souls and places like Bellflower, Fontana, the High Sierra and the 605 Freeway.

He sings in a throaty rumble of love and loss and ghosts of things past. California natives, Alvin believes, suffer an odd kind of nostalgia that comes when talk of old times refers not to generations ago but a period only a few years back. “By the time you’re 20, you’re 40 in the sense of waking up in the morning and thinking, Let’s go see the orange groves. But they’re not there anymore,” he says. “They’re just gone.”

lvin, a fourth-generation Californian, born and raised in Downey, wrote one of his best songs, “Dry River,” about the cement channel running through his hometown. He recalls the time he bicycled to an orange grove near his home, only to find a field of stumps. The trees had been chopped down overnight to make way for apartments and commercial development.

Alvin, 55, has never been an overtly political singer, in the sense of writing protest songs or lending his name to a cause. But he is an acute observer of politics—especially California politics—and with the Golden State in seemingly perpetual crisis, with high unemployment, meat-cleaver budget cuts and a government paralyzed by partisanship, he suggests the state, as we know it, may be headed the way of those orange groves. Listen closely, and you might hear it in a song.

RTWT.

I grew up in the City of Orange, and walked to school through orange groves. You miss them when they're gone. There's still a few left, actually, but few and far between. This is Orange County, for crying out loud.

BONUS: Check Dave Alvin's website.