Philly Anthems: 12 Local Artists Score America's 250th
Give a public radio station a national birthday and a citywide identity crisis, and this is what you get: not a fireworks jingle, but a year-long relay of original songs handed off between a Grammy-winning bassist, a house-music matriarch, and a four-woman band that won its slot in a 24-hour writing sprint. WXPN's "Philly Anthems" is the soundtrack the semiquincentennial actually deserves — one that assumes the city has something to say about America, and hands it a microphone instead of a flag.
Here's the setup. For the nation's 250th, 88.5 FM commissioned 12 original songs from 12 Philadelphia-area artists, each written new for the project and pointed at the ideas baked into the Declaration of Independence — freedom, identity, the unfinished argument about who "we the people" includes. The roster splits between five established names and seven rising ones: The Hooters co-founder Eric Bazilian, Grammy-winning bassist Christian McBride, soul singer Devon Gilfillian, house legend Lady Alma, and multi-instrumentalist Eliza Hardy Jones anchor the veteran side. Behind them come Sug Daniels, The Flying Vees, The Bul Bey, Grace Gardner, Black Buttafly, James Everhart, and Moustapha Noumbissi. The project drew support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
The first track landed this week, and it's a fitting leadoff. Bazilian — the guy who co-founded The Hooters and later wrote "One of Us," the song your aunt still hums — opened the series with "Better Times," a plainspoken, unmistakably Bazilian bit of heartland rock that looks the current moment dead in the eye. He described the song as offering a "modern and relevant perspective on the state of our union," which is a diplomatic way of saying it's a birthday card with a raised eyebrow.
From here, the release schedule reads like a slow-drip mixtape. New songs roll out roughly every other week — Eliza Hardy Jones on July 27, Lady Alma on Aug. 10, Christian McBride on Aug. 24 — with the remaining tracks arriving through the fall. The full collection then gets the treatment it's earned: a vinyl LP planned for Record Store Day in April 2027, the whole civic songbook pressed to wax for the crate-diggers of 2027 and the historians of 2076.
Why it matters: most 250th programming will be parades, reenactors, and a commemorative coin nobody spends. "Philly Anthems" is the rare official-birthday gesture that treats the city as a living scene rather than a diorama. Putting McBride's jazz next to Lady Alma's house next to a rock lifer next to The Flying Vees — who reportedly earned their spot through WXPN's 24-hour song challenge — is itself an argument: that "Philadelphia sound" was never one sound, and America wasn't one voice either. The project's smartest move is refusing to pick a genre, because refusing to pick is the most Philadelphia thing imaginable.
It also quietly answers a question that hangs over every anniversary: who gets to write the anthem? WXPN's answer is twelve people, not one, and half of them you haven't heard yet. That's a bet on the next 250 years as much as a toast to the last.
So mark the calendar. New song every couple weeks, the full spread by fall, vinyl in spring. Independence Hall gets the tourists; this is the block party. Cue it up, Philly — the birthday's got a beat now, and it's ours.
Sources: WXPN taps 12 local musicians for 'Philly Anthems' album (PhillyVoice); WXPN Announces the Soundtrack to America's 250th (xpn.org); WXPN's Philly Anthems begins today with a new song from Eric Bazilian (xpn.org)