‘Can’t Afford Not To’: Grammy award-winning Jon Carroll celebrates release of first album in 18 years

Musician Jon Carroll, co-founder of the Starland Vocal Band, won two Grammy Awards in 1977 for the hit song “Afternoon Delight,” but his musical accomplishments extend far beyond that breakout success. His résumé includes performing with The Chicks and Mary Chapin Carpenter and writing songs recorded by Linda Ronstadt, Tom Jones and Kenny Rogers. Now, Carroll is turning his attention to a new album with a socially conscious message.

Carroll celebrated the release of “Can’t Afford Not To” — his fourth solo album and first in 18 years — at The Iron Horse in Northampton on Wednesday, Aug. 11. The 14-track album features 12 original songs spanning a range of genres, including Americana, jazz, gospel, reggae, soul and R&B.

It was a full-circle moment for Carroll to launch his new album at The Iron Horse, where a show he played in the late 1980s planted the seed that he should move to the Valley from Washington, D.C. He returned to The Iron Horse several more times in the 90s and early 2000s. In fact, his brother-in-law O’Brian Tomalin is currently the venue’s executive chef.

One day, while Carroll was sitting on his tour bus outside the venue when he thought, “Okay, this is kind of a cool town.”

“As a traveling musician, you make these notes everywhere you go. … ‘I could live here.’ It’s always a theoretical,” he said. But when he and his wife decided more than a decade ago that they wanted to move, the Valley seemed like a good choice.

“[Northampton is] not an industry town, but the thing that turned me on about this whole area was that it just always seemed like a very creative place. There’s a creative hum,” he said.

Western Massachusetts already had another tie to Carroll’s career, as it turned out. Bill Danoff, who wrote “Afternoon Delight” — the song that earned Carroll his Grammys — and co-wrote John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” is from Springfield. When Carroll and the rest of the Starland Vocal Band were recording “Afternoon Delight” in New York City in the fall of 1975, they had a week off midway through the process. Danoff suggested they use the break to tour New England rather than make the drive back to Washington, D.C.

“‘It’s really nice. It’s fall. You could meet my mom. … We could go to Springfield. We don’t need to stay long — have dinner, maybe stay over, it doesn’t matter. But then let’s take the week and drive through New England,’” Carroll recalled Danoff saying.

They did exactly that, “and it was an enchanted week,” Carroll said. “I could write a whole book about just that week. That was when I sort of fell in love with New England, per se, and western Massachusetts was a huge part of that.”

For the past 10 years, Carroll and his wife, Meredith, have lived in Easthampton — in Eastworks, in fact, the same building where he records. His childhood during the civil rights era, however, laid the groundwork for the social justice themes that inform and underscore his new album.

The album’s opening track, “(You Gotta) Stand Up!,” is a clarion call against the dangers of fascism: “There’s a whole lot more of us who know what’s right / They’ll keep right on destroying us if we keep sitting tight / We’ve got to open up the window to let in some light / You gotta stand up!”

“I’m of an age where I’ve seen this arc of corruption in our government, and I’m not gonna sit still when someone says, ‘It’s always been that way. That’s just politics.’ No, it’s not,” Carroll said.

“No one is exempt from an authoritarian regime,” he added. “Standing up is going to be quite required. … If folks are sitting around wondering if it’s smart or not to go to the demonstration, or if it’s smart or not to turn out and defend your neighbor who’s getting harassed or rounded up — well, we’ve lost. We’ll be saluting from the sidewalks of Vichy. That’s what that song’s all about.”

The album’s title track, “Can’t Afford Not To,” has a reggae sound and follows the narrator as he recalls down-and-out strangers giving him help, be it money or a thumbs-up in a transit station.

“The folks who like that song tend to think it’s about altruism, and it really isn’t. It’s not that I don’t believe in altruism, but the message of the song is, ‘We have to take care of each other,’” he said.

The guitar-heavy “Into and Outa The Storm,” inspired by a photo of a young family driving to North Dakota for an oil field job in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn, is about one half of a couple reassuring the other that they’ll weather the uncertainty of the future: “While we’re sailing / Into tomorrow / No map to follow / I’ll be staying / Right by your side, baby, into and outta the storm.”

Carroll spoke at length about how key events of the 20th and 21st centuries shaped his sense of civic responsibility. The 9/11 attacks made him realize that political officials would seize the opportunity to convince Americans that it’s “okay to hate dark-skinned people.” Watching the Watergate hearings as a teenager was “the first time in my life that I saw that these guys weren’t upfront.”

Years later, he said the Iran hostage crisis was another wake-up call. Carroll teared up as he recalled a childhood memory of seeing his family’s part-time housekeeper Dorothy stricken with fear in the wake of Robert F. Kennedy Sr.’s assassination.

“I didn’t get it then, but I saw what it was to her,” he said.

Those events — and others — impressed upon Carroll the importance of viewing the government with a skeptical eye. “Don’t fall for everything,” he said. “Read history.” Even the Founding Fathers knew it, he said: “They were trying to set it up to prevent exactly what’s happened now, which is, what if guys get in there that just say, ‘Screw all this. I’m taking it’?”

Or, as he said in his album’s title track: “We’ve got to speak up, we’ve got to reach up / And raise your voice in every way you know how / Don’t be toes-up, you gotta show up / Ain’t no better time to do it than now.”

“I would like folks to take away from this record a sense of community and responsibility,” he said, “but also celebration, and at the end of that process, it’s good music — good music you can dance to.”

“Can’t Afford Not To” is available on major streaming platforms or for purchase at Carroll’s website for $10 or $20 for a high-resolution version. To purchase the album or for more information about Carroll, visit joncarroll.org.