DeLuca’s 5 Picks: Pink and Margo Price protest songs, plus Nightlands and music of ‘The Bear’

1. Pink, “Irrelevant.” One day last week Pink tweeted: “Woke up. Got heated. Wrote song. Coming soon.”

The song that the Doylestown native born Alecia Moore penned — and posted handwritten lyrics to — is “Irrelevant,” an emphatic protest song, a rallying cry of defiance in which the singer refuses to be defined by others and works herself up into a righteous rage.

The collaborative effort with songwriter-producer Ian Fitchuk is clearly inspired by the recent Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but is ready made to fit all kinds of protests.

It strategically evokes both The Who’s “The Kids Are Alright” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” which was written by the late Philadelphia singer Robert Hazard. “Girls just wanna have rights,” she sings. “So why do we have to fight?”

In a statement, Pink wrote: “As a woman with an opinion and the fearlessness to voice that opinion, it gets very tiring when the only retort is to tell me how irrelevant I am. I am relevant because I exist, and because I am a human being. No one is irrelevant. And no one can take away my voice.” Proceeds from sales of the song go to Michelle Obama’s voting initiative When We All Vote.

2. Nightlands, Moonshine. Besides playing with The War On Drugs — you know, the Philly band that opened for the Rolling Stones in London last month — Dave Hartley makes music as Nightlands, a project that leans toward the ethereal, with spacious synth-based songs and vocals that reach skyward.

Moonshine is the first Nightlands album since 2017′s I Can Feel The Night Around Me, and its contemplative nature is in part the result of the musician’s move from Philadelphia to Asheville, N.C., where Hartley, a new parent, worked in isolation during the pandemic in a studio in a barn outside his century-old house.

Lots of Philly musicians make contributions to New Age-tinged tracks like “No Kiss For the Lonely,” however, including Eric Slick, Michael Kiley, and Jessie Hale Moore, plus Hartley’s bandmates Charlie Hall, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Anthony LaMarca. The War On Drugs play the XPoNential Music Festival with Patti Smith on Sept. 16.

3. Margo Price featuring Mavis Staples and Adia Victoria, “Fight To Make It.” Last September when Margo Price played the Mann Center with Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Tour, she debuted a cover of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” in protest after Texas passed restrictive antiabortion legislation that month.

Now, Price has teamed with gospel great Mavis Staples and blues and Americana songwriter Adia Victoria to release this rockin’ country fight song that she has said was originally inspired by Amelia Earhart and Rosa Parks.

Along with “Irrelevant,” it’s one of what will surely be many protest songs released in the coming months. In a statement, Price said: “Every day I see more of our rights stripped away in America. The right to reproductive health in this country has become a luxury for the wealthy …. Black women in particular experience maternal mortality at a rate two to three times higher than white women.”

Proceeds from Bandcamp sales of the song benefit Noise for Now, which connects artists with grassroots organizations that work in reproductive justice, including abortion access. Price’s memoir Maybe We’ll Make It is due from University of Texas Press in October.

Don McCloskey. Bucks County born Don McCloskey is celebrating the release of The Chaos & the Beauty, a 10-song collection recorded in Brooklyn with Philly expats Devin Greenwood and Ali Wadsworth and guitarist Ross Bellinoit and released on his own Lemon Hill Records label.

The St. Joe’s Prep grad has a varied history: He wrote “Unstoppable,” the Phillies anthem that was played at Citizens Bank Park during the team’s (long ago) 2009 World Series run, he’s toured with Wu-Tang Clan rapper Raekwon and last Christmas he released a terrific reworked version of “O Holy Night.”

On Friday, he was set to play Ardmore Music Hall with Philly songwriter Chris Kasper, whose 2017 song “City By The Sea” is a Jersey Shore snapshot of Ventnor before it went bougie. This show has now been postponed because of COVID and will be rescheduled for the fall. ardmoremusichall.com.

The music of The Bear. The highly bingeable series about a hotshot chef who comes home to Chicago to run his family sandwich shop, that stars Jeremy Allen White, has a serious verisimilitude quotient in its authentic depiction of in-the-kitchen restaurant culture.

But the FX on Hulu series created by Christopher Storer also has something else going for it: a top notch, consistently surprising but not show-offy soundtrack put together by Storer and his music supervisor partner Josh Senior. There’s not too much music forced on the viewer as is often the case with prestige TV productions. Instead, it’s used sparingly, and often packs an emotional punch, whether it’s Counting Crowes’ “Have You Seen Me Lately?” or John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Check It Out.”

The show’s Windy City identity comes through with Wilco’s “Via Chicago” (and also “Impossible Germany”) and also Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago,” though there’s no sign of Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town” in the first season. But there’s also lots of not-trendy far-flung acts, like Swedish hard core band Refused and perfectly fitting instrumental rock from Staten Island ensemble The Budos Band. Last week the show was renewed for a second season.