Ron Gallo performed at the Whitney Museum of Art in April. He’s played sets at Coachella and Bonnaroo as a solo act. And before that, he was busy fronting acclaimed bands like Philly’s Toy Soldiers, a blues-inspired quintet. As a veteran of the city’s hardcore punk scene, Gallo has truly seen crowds of all shapes and sizes.
Nothing, however, prepared him for the adoration he recently received from an audience in war-torn Ukraine. “Some of them lived in a city that was bombed the night before, and they were telling me how grateful they were,” says Gallo. “It was eye-opening and humbling.”
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Those fans didn’t buy tickets. Gallo didn’t even play music for them. Instead, he met the Ukrainians on a video-conference call as part of an English-learning class. Members of the class, some of whom were as young as elementary schoolers and others as old as 60, did not know much at all of Gallo’s accomplished career. What they did know, however, was a 66-second video that he’d recently posted on social media.
“Given what’s going on today, how do we talk about it? How do we laugh about it? What do we do about it?” — Ron Gallo
On March 3, days after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a fiery visit to the White House, Gallo recorded himself singing and strumming an acoustic guitar. The song, If only Zelensky Had A Really Nice Suit, quickly went viral.
“Thousands of people from Ukraine started commenting on the video, all of this love from Ukraine,” says Gallo. “I didn’t think they’d see this as an act of solidarity, given the American political situation right now, but it was powerful.”
The song is part of an ongoing satirical project that Gallo has been pursuing since February as a way of coping with the day-to-day reality of the Trump administration. On most days, he’s been waking up at dawn and writing TikTok-sized songs in response to the news cycle.
@rongallomusic passion for fasc’in #zelenskyy #ukraine #trump #fashion #lifehack #satire #songwritersoftiktok
If he thinks he’s got something — and he usually does (he’s recorded dozens of songs in the series over the past three months, 44 of which are available as a collection here and the others dispersed throughout his social media) — he quickly records the song with minimal retakes. The songs have tackled a wide range of headlining stories, from ICE raids to NPR’s budget to conspiracy theories that J.D. Vance killed the Pope. Each one clocks in at under 90 seconds.
It’s now an expanding lyrical catalog which he’s dubbed “7am Songs of Resistance for the Internet.”
Hardcore roots
Until the pandemic, Gallo, 32, had a deep aversion to social media. It was reflective of his musical upbringing as an independent artist in Philadelphia. Gallo is proudly punk. (Social media, for the most part, is not.)
While growing up in South Jersey, Gallo was a creative kid who found community in basement shows and garages throughout the Philly region. “It was the golden age of punk and hardcore,” he says. “I found all these weirdos and that’s where the whole thing started.” He formed his own straight-edge band in high school and began playing small shows at VFW halls — ”a very classic, DIY, romantic Philly basement upbringing.”
Then, as an undergraduate at Temple University, he blossomed into a songwriter while living in an apartment complex off Broad Street which was filled with UArts students. On weekends, there’d be stiff competition. “We used to have kitchen shows, basement shows, the whole courtyard that we lived in, like every house would be having a different band play in it,” Gallo says.
After college, Gallo continued to grow as an artist, recording albums that defied the constraints of any one genre. As the frontman of Toy Soldiers, a band with several Philly natives whose name comes from a painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he won plaudits for albums that veered heavily into gospel music and the blues. Music critic Richie Unterberger compared Gallo’s vocals to a “down-home Lou Reed.”
After Toy Soldiers disbanded in 2014, Gallo shifted to solo acts and a smaller circle of collaborators. He’s continued to expand his artistic boundaries, releasing a diverse discography that’s at times reminiscent of everything from 60s folk music to 90s garage rock to the contemporary sounds of The Black Keys. His most recent album, Foreground Music, was released in 2023.
“I was lucky to see the last era of the traditional music industry model, which is to make a record, put it out, do the press and the publicity, do the tour,” he says. “But in 2020, the rug was pulled out from everyone. The music industry has not recovered. It’s completely changed.”
Embracing social media
Gallo was scheduled to play a festival in Nashville on March 11, 2020, which was the day that the NBA cancelled all of its games. Then, the music festival — and effectively, the rest of the country — decided to follow suit. That’s when Gallo and bandmates pivoted. They began livestreaming their own set from a home studio on Instagram live, taking their music directly to fans.
“Thousands and thousands of people from all over the world tuned in because they were all in the same situation,” Gallo says. “People were sending us donations. And in the back of my mind, I think that’s when my relationship with social media began to change.”
When Gallo played a show at The Whitney Museum of Art earlier this year, the announcement described his music as towing the line “between optimism and crushing nihilism.” The same could be said about his own — and much of society’s — relationship to these new forms of communication and artistic distribution that only exist on the Internet.
“It began out of pure necessity, hoping that maybe people can find some relief in these songs.” — Ron Gallo
During the pandemic, Gallo viewed social media as a lifeline for professional musicians, not a tool that he’d employ once everything reopened. In fact, once he began touring again in 2023, Gallo, who describes himself as a musical “purist” of sorts, thought that chapter had closed. “Going on Tiktok with a guitar and playing my songs felt like this kind of soul-crushing thing to do.”
But the ascent of Donald Trump into the White House for a second time flipped the script for Gallo. He’d been writing thoughtful music for years confronting the political and cultural climate of the nation, including themes such as the rise of autocracy and the trampling of basic rights in the first Trump presidency. Clearly, after the results of the 2024 election, that message still needed to reach people. Maybe this time the moment called for something more direct?
“I decided to get over myself and see a tool that’s there,” he says, referring to social media platforms. “I’ve got so much that I’m thinking about, and that I want to say, but making a record about this isn’t really going to make sense.”
Connecting with others in despair
Despite only being roughly a minute of music, “If Only Zelensky” is full of the folksy humor and adept political analysis about America’s commander in chief that also accompanies many of Gallo’s songs:
If only Zelensky Had A Really Nice Suit
And didn’t wear all black to match with his troops …
If only Zelensky Had A Really Nice Suit
A $10K Brioni in Navy Blue, a white shirt and red tie
No one else would have to die
Gallo never intended to build a fanbase off the project. He imagined it as a way of connecting to other like-minded people who might otherwise feel despair in the news. While politics have often seeped into his music, Gallo hopes that the most overtly-political endeavor of his career, “7am songs,” can contribute to more collective action at the end of the day. And that longing for connectivity is something that’s a consistent theme of his song lyrics.
“It began out of pure necessity, hoping that maybe people can find some relief in these songs,” he says. “Given what’s going on today, how do we talk about it? How do we laugh about it? What do we do about it?”
To be clear, Gallo is not transforming into a full-on political influencer. He just finished with the studio recording of an upcoming, yet untitled album that he expects to release later this year. After putting in countless hours on those tracks, “7am songs” has also been something of a creative cleanse.
“I have a whole other side to my career where I can go nuts in the studio and be all perfectionist about songs and production,” he says. “But with this, I’m keeping it really simple. It’s basically just two chords and truth.”
As you might expect, sometimes Gallo’s version of the truth clashes with political narratives that other Americans hold dear. While he expected some degree of hate in the comments section of his songs, Gallo says that it’s impossible to not be affected by some of that negativity, like when he’s received threats of violence from Trump supporters. “I like to think that I have thick skin, and if people disagree with me, I usually love it because I can start a dialogue with them,” he says. “But there are limits, you know?”
Still, he hasn’t let the haters stop him — an attitude that’s allowed him to ambitiously veer from genre to genre, finding his own unique voice and sound throughout his career. Gallo has no plans to stop his “7am songs” anytime soon. After all, it wouldn’t be very punk of him.
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