Rolling Stone recently interviewed Ken Casey from the Dropkick Murphys about the Woody Guthrie penned "Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight" from their upcoming album. The band was given permission from the late folk legend's daughter Nora to access the Guthrie archives. Casey explained that "Woody's grandson knew our band… He went to his mother, Nora, and told her that we would be a good fit to record his music, because we're both products of and champions of the working class."

The article goes on to describe the band's experience with the Guthrie archives: "I was in awe that we'd get the opportunity to go down to New York and look through his archives. I had to put on the special white gloves and was holding pieces of paper that were written on in the 1940s. There were little notes next to the pieces, like, 'I wrote this in a Subway Station in Boston in 1941.' Most of the handwritten songs looked like they were written on a boxcar in the dark. You could barely make out the words."

About the music the band wrote for the lyrics: "we made it the hardest song on the record because we had the idea that if we were going to use one of Woody's pieces, we wanted to do it as differently as possible. I just kind of looked at the lyrics and started building a vocal melody around it. God knows what music Mr. Guthrie had meant for his words, but that's how it wound up."