Folk popper Katie Herzig has released a new single and video celebrating love, diversity, and the Women’s March that took place in January. Herzig marched with some 15,000 people in Nashville on that day and filmed and photographed much of the proceedings. It’s those images that populate the rousing video for “I Want to Make You Proud”, a larger than life song that could be another anthem for the resurgent women’s rights movement. It’s also a damn catchy song with hooks galore and appealing synthpop walls of sound.
Herzig tells PopMatters, “I wasn’t planning for this song to be the first single I’d release for this new project, but after I attended the Women’s March on Nashville, this song, like so many others, took on new meaning, and it fit so well with the footage and pictures I had taken that day. This march wasn’t one of the biggest ones out there but it was bigger than we all expected in Nashville. Out of the millions who marched around the world, 15,000 people showed up here, from all over and for all sorts of reasons. I really just wanted to document and capture the beauty of that, the people, the messages…. So much of what we value as a democratic society and as humans who care about the well-being of other humans is at stake and all these people showed up to support and defend those values. It was very moving and I was proud to be there.”