Ry Cooder’s Election Special is a wake-up call as the US heads into the 2012 fall election season. On Election Special, which he produced, Cooder plays mandolin, guitar, and bass and wrote all of the songs, co-writing one with Joachim Cooder, who plays drums on the record.

Ry Cooder's I, Flathead, is the culmination of his ambitious and fascinating "California Trilogy", the last of three albums in which the singer and guitarist journeys through the real and imagined history of mid-20th century, multi-ethnic California, sampling the sounds of its barrios and byways, its nightclubs and honkytonks. He encounters the disenfranchised, the hopeful, the cheerfully strange and seriously nefarious, along with the occasional alien who races around in a souped-up flying saucer on the desert salt flats.

Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down, issued between two national election cycles, is the most overtly political album Ry Cooder has ever released, and one of his funniest, most musically compelling ones, too. Cooder looks deeply into his musical past using his entire Americana musical arsenal: blues, folk, ragtime, norteño, rock, and country here. Opener "No Banker Left Behind" updates Civil War-era marching music.

Ry Cooder’s Election Special is a wake-up call as the US heads into the 2012 fall election season. On Election Special, which he produced, Cooder plays mandolin, guitar, and bass and wrote all of the songs, co-writing one with Joachim Cooder, who plays drums on the record.