Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle has enlisted an impressive roster of musicians to contribute to what NPR calls its “conceptual soundtrack” — an album called Resistance Radio: The Man In The High Castle Album. The album is comprised of music you might find playing in the neutral zone in a Philip K. Dick-reimagined post-WWII United States, divided up by the axis powers. It’s in this neutral zone that a resistance movement to the Imperial Japan-governed West Coast and Nazi Germany-governed East Coast is arising, and so this album, alas, is the soundtrack to their movement.
And their movement happens to have gathered some bafflingly contemporary musicians — Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten, Kevin Morby, Karen O, Beck, Norah Jones, Michael Kiwanuka, and the Shins — to add sound to their cause, produced by noted post-WWII rebels Danger Mouse and Sam Cohen. Olsen’s track, a cover of Tin Pan Alley’s “Who’s Sorry Now” (which became known through a recording by Connie Francis) was just shared today.
The concept for the album has been fleshed out with an entire Resistance Radio website. (The notion of an Amazon-backed “resistance” anything — beyond perhaps a resistance to independent bookstores and labor unions — is of course a bit laughable, even in a fictional alternate reality.)
“Hijacking the airwaves, a secret network of DJs broadcast messages of hope to keep the memory of a former America alive. Using music to hearten the spirits of the hopeless, they play bootleg songs that are performed and played in makeshift studios with obsolete equipment,” reads a statement on the ornate marketing platform/pirate radio website.
Listen to Olsen’s version of the song (which fits pretty excellently with some of her vintage country-infused songwriting, particularly from Burn Your Fire for No Witness):
The album is out April 7.
Watch the video for Pops, off Olsen’s fantastic 2016 album My Woman: