The first five Philly Anthems songs came from names Philadelphia already knew. On October 5, the Philly Anthems emerging artists got their turn: seven new songs from Grace Gardner, Sug Daniels, Black Buttafly, The Bul Bey, JR Everhart, Moustapha Noumbissi and The Flying Vees, plus a bonus track written by Alexis Cunningham and Eric Bazilian.
Those first five were Bazilian, Eliza Hardy Jones, Lady Alma, Christian McBride and Devon Gilfillian, released one at a time from July into mid-September. They were the headliners of the 12-song Philly Anthems commission, which WXPN built for the national 250th anniversary with support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
Meet the Philly Anthems Emerging Artists
Among the Philly Anthems emerging artists, Gardner’s “Backspin” is written as a letter, aimed at prejudice and at the case for empathy and community action on human rights. Daniels’ “Are You With Me” is a call to act against complacency, drawn from shared immigrant and working-class roots. Black Buttafly’s “That’s Home” asks what home means once you count community, love, safety and a city that keeps changing.
The Bul Bey’s “North Star” looks at a city whose “social and civic fabric has frayed,” according to WXPN’s notes, and borrows its title from the abolitionist newspaper Frederick Douglass published. Everhart’s “Bells of July” offers what WXPN calls “a stark warning that history repeats itself.” Noumbissi’s song asks America to become a place of love, care and refuge.
Clockwise from top left: The Bul Bey, Grace Gardner, JR Everhart, Black Buttafly, The Flying Vees, Second Star, Sug Daniels, Moustapha Noumbissi.
What the Philly Anthems Emerging Artists Did With the Brief
Here is what stands out. The assignment was an anthem for a birthday, and a birthday song usually waves a flag. Several of these seven wrote about prejudice, a frayed civic fabric, a warning from history. They treated the word anthem as a place to argue with the country they were asked to toast, which is the harder and more honest job.
The Flying Vees are the one entry that sounds like a day job. The band won the 24 Hour Song Challenge, a contest that drew nearly 350 entrants and paid a $5,000 honorarium, with slots at the XPoNential Music Festival and Philly Music Fest attached. Their “Workman’s Song #1” is about a promise of personal liberty “constantly being dangled just out of reach.” That is a working band writing about work.
The bonus track is a co-write by Cunningham and Bazilian, and WXPN describes it as a look at the distance between the American Dream as promised and the complicated reality. Bazilian already had one of the first five songs, so his name shows up on both halves of the project, a small thread tying the established artists to the new ones.
What Comes Next for the Philly Anthems Emerging Artists
All twelve songs are headed to vinyl. WXPN plans the album for its Record Store Day release in April 2027, and two concerts are planned around the project, though dates haven’t been announced. WXPN’s Philly 250 programming and the station’s World Cafe Sense of Place series both tie songs to specific places, and this project follows the same instinct.
WXPN’s project page collects the new seven and the bonus track together. Hearing the Philly Anthems emerging artists after the first five is the cleanest way to see how the project widened, from established names to the newer voices in the same city. The bonus track sits at the end of that arc, a late co-write between a veteran and a newcomer.
The five familiar names will sell the record, and that is how it works. But the seven newcomers decide whether it is worth keeping. Songs written to fit an anniversary go quiet when the bunting comes down. Songs written as arguments about the city, its promises and its failures, get a second life at the next election, the next anniversary, the next time someone asks what Philadelphia is for.
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