n the morning of 4 November, following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump will refuse to leave the White House. Instead, an angry mob will drag his body to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Senator Mitch McConnell will be forced to kill and eat the 45th incumbent in a deranged cannibal ritual. Rightwing cults will rise up: new communities that worship Trump’s dead excreted relics. But they will eventually die in some pestilent version of the Rapture, leaving behind an equitable, caring society. “Yes, that’s pretty much it,” says John Cameron Mitchell after I sum up his fevered fantasy for a future America as outlined in the title track of his debut solo LP, New American Dream Vol 1 and accompanying animated video. “Trump’s shit has infected the water supply and turned everyone into the Unabomber.” As the title suggests, this is just the first instalment in a promised state-of-the-nation duology that the 57-year-old actor, playwright, screenwriter and director wrote during lockdown with the help of 40-plus collaborators including Ezra Furman, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, Neutral Milk Hotel’s Julian Koster and Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff. “It’s about the joy of trying to do something,” says Mitchell. “This feels very much like a watershed year, when everyone will remember the young people, the Generation Z kids who were creating alternatives. I’m not a ‘cancel culture’ person. I am a ‘Let’s create the alternative’ person. Yes, call out bad behaviour, but also let’s do something.” Twenty-two years ago, Mitchell and his collaborator Stephen Trask created Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the game-changing gender-fluid glam-rock musical that became a defining text for the 21st century’s gender non-conforming community. At the time, he referred to the work as “an oasis in a time of panic”. New American Dream feels similar: an album fuelled by sadness, rage and helplessness that still has an undercurrent of optimism and hope. “Before lockdown,” says Mitchell, speaking from his home in Provincetown, Massachusetts, “I was doing a Hedwig-themed tour, The Origin of Love. I was about to go to Korea, Japan, New York. And then of course everything stopped. But I actually thrive in isolation.” He found himself self-isolating in a 100-year-old stone hut near Palm Springs, bored and depressed. So he reached out to various musical friends who sent him instrumental tracks that he could write melody and lyrics to. “Kind of like the surrealist drawing game Exquisite Corpse.” He began developing what he now calls “a lockdown-inspired remotely organised platonic musical orgy”. He explains: “I was talking to Our Lady J who’s this wonderful trans writer and singer. She’d been looking at homeless people during the pandemic and thinking, ‘How do you shelter at home when you have no home?’ That became our first song, See You Again. Thorgy Thor from RuPaul’s Drag Race added violin, Eleanor Norton added cello and we suddenly had something to work with.” Financially stable thanks to his central role as an acerbic magazine editor in the hit TV show Shrill, Mitchell decided that “we should just keep doing this as a benefit album for the three causes closest to my heart: a trans justice group, an African American scholarship programme and this Covid food bank in Mexico City, which has been helping sex workers and migrants who are afraid to go to the other food banks.” A number of the songs on the album were inspired by the current political, financial and human rights crises in the US including Segarra’s forlornly beautiful American Sickness (“How did it come to this? / I know for some shame no longer exists”) and Say Their Names, a lament for all the trans women killed in America in the past 12 months, which Mitchell wrote with the pop songwriter and queer artist Leland. “The woman giving the speech at the end of that song,” says Mitchell, “is Melania Brown, the sister of Layleen Polanco, the 27-year-old Afro-Latinx trans woman who died at Rikers Island jail on 7 June 2019. And the person reading out the names of the dead is trans Drag Race star Peppermint.” While Mitchell agrees New American Dream is “definitely an album about right now”, he stresses that “there are love songs here also”. These include the gorgeous No Debt, written with Ezra Furman and inspired by Denis Johnson’s 1992 short story collection Jesus’ Son, and two songs, Sophia and Picaflor, written with the French singer/songwriter Izae, who Mitchell contacted on Instagram because he liked his cover of a Hedwig song. “Picaflor was the first song I ever wrote after a terrible breakup,” says Mitchell. “You know, depressed in a bath and singing into my iPhone. Izae came back with a wonderful chord progression so I said, ‘Would you mind playing my boyfriend on this song? We still haven’t met in person.” With the album completed and volume two in the works, Mitchell says: “A couple of publishing companies have been in touch with concerns about it being a benefit album. One said, ‘What if it’s a hit?’ I’m like, ‘Have you listened to the songs? This is all cabaret baby, relax. Nothing’s going top 10 here.” With that in mind, what does Mitchell hope to achieve by releasing New American Dream into the hellscape of 2020? “All I can think is that the money from this record will help feed families in Mexico City, will go towards the TGI Justice project, will help some kid gets their MLK scholarship. It’s a small ripple effect, but that’s enough. At my heart I’m a worried optimist, but I’m also an old hippie. I really do believe most people want peace and cooperation.” New American Dream Vol 1 by John Cameron Mitchell and Friends is available to download from newamericandream.bandcamp.com. • This article was updated on 6 September 2020 to clarify that Melania Brown reads the speech at the end of Say Their Names, while Drag Race star Peppermint reads out the names.