If you could call out to your country, what would you say? When Eric Bibb embarked on the title song that would galvanize his latest album, Dear America, the songwriter found himself unpacking a seven-decade relationship with a partner of dramatic extremes. Bibb has known many different Americas, the good, the bad and the ugly. Born in New York City on August 16th, 1951, the thunderbolt of the Sixties folk revival remains an era so alive in the 69-year-old's memory. Yet just as vivid are the dark societal flashpoints of the last year, when protesters highlighted the open wound of US race relations while a bitter Presidential election scrawled jagged battlelines. "This album is a love letter," Bibb explains of the record's root concept, "because America, for all of it's associations with pain and it's bloody history, has always been a place of incredible hope and optimism. You see young people now and it's amazing, with the whole Black Lives Matter movement. All of those things let me know that there is a kind of reverberation from that Sixties energy. You can't keep a good thing down."