Some days, it’s like you can’t even toss a copy of Cat Scratch Fever into the garbage without accidentally hitting some famous and powerful Republican who likes to cosplay as a rock’n’roll hero on the weekends. You already have Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe Music, James Dolan’s JD & The Straight Shot, and Mike Huckabee’s Capitol Offense. Now, after a weekend media blitz from a lawyer recently appointed to Donald Trump‘s legal team, another group enters the canon: the Jay Sekulow Band.
Sekulow, 61, is heretofore best known as a legal ideologue with his own popular conservative talk show, devoted to defending the causes of the Christian right. He’s also a diehard Trump supporter, and he was recently added to the group of lawyers working for the president in the investigation into alleged Russian influence on the 2016 election. He gave interviews in the latter capacity all day Sunday, most notably to Fox News, during which he managed to assert that Trump both is and is not under investigation by the DOJ within a span of only a few minutes. He has not proven himself very good at his job of representing the president so far.
More importantly for our purposes, Sekulow is also a musician. On Monday afternoon, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski unearthed what at first seemed like Sekulow’s personal Soundcloud, which was filled with reposts of bangers by Kiiara and Borgore alongside rips of his own radio appearances. Sekulow’s camp is denying the page’s authenticity, which makes sense considering that his actual tastes seem to hew closer to AOR schlock.
He’s a musical polymath who plays drums and guitar in a group that also includes the Christian rock singers John Schlitt (of the band Petra) and John Elefante (who after a brief stint filling in for Steve Walsh as the singer of Kansas in the ’80s, now plays with a Christian outfit called Mastedon). Here’s the lyric video for a tasty lil’ Jay Sekulow tune called “Undemocratic,” which includes the line “Democracy in motion means a right to take sides / Since when is one rewarded for the emails she hides?” The video features many ominous shots of the IRS building, in case you’re unclear of the territory we’re in.
And here’s “Through the Years” a Christian rocker with political overtones and borderline-nonsensical lyrics. For example: “As we face the days / under the world political / shaping the fiber of the nations / in that you can be sure it’s unsure.” Sekulow’s stance on getting extremely high on marijuana and grokking about the true nature of liberty during a writing sesh with your bandmates is unclear.
The original songs, however, are somewhat of an anomaly for the JSB (as any true fans refer to them). Their oeuvre on YouTube consists mostly of covers of songs by the likes of Boston and the Eagles. Here they are doing the Beatles’ “Taxman,” a song with an obvious appeal to a conservative like Sekulow.
Sekulow isn’t any better at rockin’ out than he is at defending Trump. Maybe he should go back to his day job of demonizing Muslims and gay people in the name of religious liberty.
