If Americana had a panic attack in the middle of a Kafka novel and still managed to two-step its way through the wreckage, you’d probably hear Digney Fignus’ “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” drifting through the smoke. It’s folk with a razor in its boot. A protest song dressed like a porch jam. A fairy tale that just took off its pants and started yelling at Congress.
And it works. God, it works.
There’s this thing Fignus does—this sleight of hand where he feeds you a spoonful of melody while sneaking a brick through your window. He’s not here to soothe you. He’s here to remind you that the whole damn parade’s naked and everyone’s clapping anyway. He takes Hans Christian Andersen’s fable, swirls it in a cocktail of Eastern Bloc rhythms, banjo-fried folk, and hickory-smoked satire, and drops it down the gullet of 2025 like a truth bomb with a harmonica solo.
The groove is sneaky. It’s toe-tapping without being cheerful, like a funeral march wearing cowboy boots. You’ve got Malcolm Granger’s piano doing this shifty carnival shuffle, Chris Leadbetter picking mandolin like he’s trying to peel paint off a politician’s podium, and somewhere in the back Gary Urgonski’s spoons clack like the bones of forgotten whistleblowers. Fignus’ voice? It’s less croon, more sermon-from-the-scrapyard. Think John Prine if he’d swallowed a typewriter and chased it with cheap whiskey and righteous rage.
Let’s talk lyrics. This ain’t bumper sticker poetry. It’s a Molotov cocktail of verses dressed up in rhyme, exploding just when you start to hum along. “She wishes she could dress it up, but still it’s gonna show / ‘Cause everybody knows, everybody knows…”—and yeah, we do. We’ve seen the emperor. We’ve seen the threads. And Fignus is the guy standing on the corner with a bullhorn and a banjo, telling us we’re not crazy for seeing it too.
There’s a verse where he sings, “I can spy with my own eye, there’s rockets rising up into the sky, why oh why, can’t someone try, before it all explodes…” and it doesn’t just echo your nightmares—it hands them a tambourine and gets them dancing. It’s cynical. It’s urgent. It’s terrifying in its gentleness.
This isn’t just music—it’s medicine for the willfully disillusioned. Fignus isn’t preaching. He’s holding up a mirror. Not some boutique Instagram-ready mirror either. I’m talking the kind you find behind a gas station bathroom door, cracked and stained with the residue of everyone who’s tried to smile through their teeth.
Recorded with Jon Evans at Brick Hill Studio—yeah, the same Jon Evans who polished up Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan—this track somehow keeps its splinters intact. It’s clean, but not sterile. Precise, but never slick. There’s breath in the room. There’s dust on the amp. It’s alive, and it’s not here to make you comfortable.
Digney Fignus doesn’t need to shout to be heard. “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” slinks up behind you, whispers something you already know in your bones, and then struts off down the road like the ghost of Woody Guthrie carrying a sign that says “I told you so.”
You can dress up denial in silk and sequins. But Fignus rips it all off and leaves it flapping in the breeze.
And yeah… *everybody knows.*
–Leslie Banks