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Joe DeVito made the long drive from a gig in Nashville to New York on Thursday with news of director of health insurance was badly shot in his mind. He saw that people use death as an opportunity express anger at the health insurance industry and share their own stories of being denied coverage for care. Along the way, in Virginia, he stopped at a rest stop to record a song about it.
“I wanted to put in my two cents and try to convey that anger and why people are so angry,” he says The Independent.
“As a songwriter, my job is to capture these emotions and somehow wrap them in melodies and rhymes in a way that makes them more digestible and helps people understand them,” he adds.
The song is a condemnation of the health insurance industry that the victim, Brian Thompson, shaped and worked in for decades. It’s part murder ballad and part protest song, both rooted in the folk tradition. The chorus repeats the words the killer allegedly carved into shell casings found at the scene: “Reject, defend, overthrow.”
DeVito, 26, turned off his phone after posting a video on TikTok of himself singing in his car and continued driving. A little later, he got a call from his sister, who told him that she had exploded on social media. The song garnered hundreds of thousands of views, and the comments were full of praise.
He caught the moment.
“I’m surprised by the reaction,” he says. “When I wrote the song, it was very fast. I literally just digressed and wrote that. I had never seen anything like it before and it kind of took me over the same way it took over everything.”
DeVito, a folk singer-songwriter who counts Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt among his influences, says he felt uneasy about being seen as sympathetic to the killer, but felt he could say in song what many people were trying to express through killing jokes and memes on the internet.
“I want to have sympathy for Brian Thompson’s family — and I’m thinking about it. And then I think about the thousands of people who have lost loved ones, or who are up to their necks in medical debt. And I think people understand at a fundamental level that basically nobody should be killed because they’re poor,” he says. “It’s a very callous reaction, but it’s justified in many ways.”
“I hope that this emotion can be channeled into a productive discourse. I don’t like the idea of celebrating someone’s death – so that’s just a fine line I wanted to walk,” he adds.
DeVito seems to play on both of those ideas when he sings in the song, “Living is a curse if you don’t have a wallet to pay for them, and we could all be free as long as we’re not too patient. ”
DeVito’s song was part of a wave of comments, memes, jokes and even celebrations that followed Wednesday’s killing of 50-year-old Thompson. Among the hundreds of social media posts about the shocking murder, many people were moved to speak out about the injustice of the health insurance industry. Often dark jokes on X, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok talked about how cruel medical insurance companies can be to their customers.
He says he expected a negative reaction due to the emphasis of the lyrics, but that’s not what he got.
“I was expecting more war in the comments section, like a 50-50 reaction. But it’s almost like this singular front of anger towards this guy. It shows that people have suffered for a long time.”
His song was removed from TikTok a few hours after it was posted for apparently violating the company’s community guidelines — though the exact reason why isn’t certain.
DeVito grew up in Mount Vernon, north of the Bronx, and later went to college in Ashville, North Carolina. There he began to take music more seriously and perform publicly. He started publishing his songs on Soundcloud and Spotify only last year, without any real promotion. Then he started getting offers to perform all over the country, so he spent a lot of time driving and sleeping in his car.
As the police search for Thompson’s killer, DeVito stays in New York for the first time in a long time. When asked if he was thinking about the assassin, he was reluctant to answer.
“I don’t want to praise this kind of thing, but since there’s a conversation, I want to watch it and channel it. As for the killer himself, I don’t have much to say.”