Joe DeVito was on a long drive from a gig in Nashville to New York on Thursday with the news of a health insurance CEO being gunned down heavy on his mind. He saw that people were using the death as an opportunity to express anger at the health insurance industry and share their own stories of being denied coverage for care. Along the way, in Virginia, he pulled over at a rest stop to record a song about it.
“I wanted to throw my two cents in and try and try and convey that rage, and why people are so mad,” he tells The Independent.
“As a songwriter, my job is to capture these emotions and sort of 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 which the victim, Brian Thompson, had shaped and worked in for decades. It’s part murder ballad and part protest song, both of which have roots in the folk tradition. The chorus echoes the words the killer had reportedly carved onto the bullet casings found at the scene: “Deny, defend, depose.”
DeVito, 26, closed his phone after uploading the video of him singing in his car to TikTok, and carried on driving. A little while later he got a call from his sister, who told him it was blowing up on social media. The song had racked up hundreds of thousands of views and the comments were full of praise.
He had captured a moment.
“I’m surprised at the reaction,” he says. “When I wrote the song, it was very quick. I literally just pulled off the road and wrote it. I’ve never seen anything like this before and it sort of took me over in the same way it took over everybody.”
DeVito, a folk singer and songwriter who counts Woody Guthrie and Mississippi John Hurt among his influences, says he felt some unease about being perceived as sympathetic to the killer, but he felt he could say in a song what he many people were trying to express through jokes and memes about the killing online.
“I want to have sympathy for the family of Brian Thompson — and I think about that. And then I also think about the thousands of people who’ve lost loved ones, or who are up to their neck in medical debt. And I think people understand at a fundamental level that nobody should be essentially killed for being poor,” he says. “It’s a very sort of callous reaction, but in a lot of ways it’s justified.”
“I hope that this emotion can be directed into a productive discourse. I don’t like the idea of celebrating anybody’s death — so it’s just a fine line that I wanted to toe,” he adds.
DeVito seems to play on both of those ideas when he sings in the song: “Living is a curse if you ain’t got the purse to pay them, and we could all be free as long as we ain’t all too patient.”
DeVito’s song was part of a wave of commentary, memes, jokes and even celebration that followed the killing of the 50-year-old Thompson on Wednesday. Among hundreds of posts on social media about the shocking murder, many people were moved to talk about the injustice of the health insurance industry. Often the dark jokes on X, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok spoke to how cruel medical insurance companies can be to their customers.
He says he expected some backlash for the pointedness of the lyrics, but that’s not what he got.
“I was expecting more of a more of a war in the comments section, like a 50-50 reaction. But it’s almost like this unified front of anger towards this guy. It shows that people have suffered for a long time.”
His song was removed from TikTok some hours after it was posted because of an apparent breach of the company’s community guidelines — although he isn’t sure the exact reason why.
DeVito grew up in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx, and later went to college in Ashville, North Carolina. It was there he started taking his music more seriously and performing in public. He only began releasing his songs on Soundcloud and Spotify in the past year, without any real promotion. He then started receiving gig offers around the country, and so he has spent a lot of time driving around and sleeping in his car.
While the cops are searching for Thompson’s killer, DeVito is staying still in New York for the first time in a long time. When asked if he had any thoughts on the assassin, he was reluctant to answer.
“I don’t want to praise things like this, but since the conversation has come up, I want to observe and channel it. In terms of the assassin himself, I don’t have much to say.”
