(Trying to Survive YouTube playlist)

The Collective’s second album saw them broadening their musical palette — instrumentally, through arrangements that introduced synthesizer, flute, and trumpet, for instance, and compositionally, through songs that had four-to-the-floor grooves (“People”) or jazz touches that recalled Joni Mitchell’s mid-to-late-70s songwriting (“Takes More Than Time,” “Seawoman,” “Tryin’ to Survive,” “Class Mobility”).

The album was dedicated “to all the women throughout time who have organized and fought for change and especially now to our Lesbian movement, and the strength and spirit of revolution that is reshaping our world today,” and its lyrics were pointedly topical, approaching familiar issues from surprising angles. In “Class Mobility,” new BWMC member Bonnie Lockhart took on the hidden injuries of class from the point of view of a woman who feels the “sham” and “shame” of repressing her working-class origins.

In “California,” a high point of the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective’s politically-oriented songwriting, Nancy Vogl (who co-wrote the song with Lockhart) begins by evoking the state’s idyllic landscape (“summer light spills over gold rolling hills”). After a fiery trumpet solo, though, she confronts the “white racist bullshit and bloody lies” that have erased the multi-racial cast of people — “Miwok, Mohave, Piute and Pomo/ Chinese, Chicana and Japanese/ Filipina, black, and Latina/ Oklahoma refugees” — who labored to make the Golden State golden. “Who built the railroads and who split the mountains? with fire in the desert and blood on the ground,” she asks.

(“California”)

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Like their debut, Tryin’ To Survive was recorded independently and distributed by the lesbian-affiliated Olivia Records. The band produced the album for $13,000 — more than double the amount spent on their self-titled debut.

The playlist at the top of the post features the album in its entirety. Alternatively you can click on the following links to listen to individual songs off the second album:

Nicole (Debbie Lempke)

Seawoman (Debbie Lempke)

Thorazine (Suzanne Shanbaum)

Takes More Than Time (Bonnie Lockhart)

Tryin’ to Survive (Suzanne Shanbaum)

California (Bonnie Lockhart / Nancy Vogl)

Back to Boston (Nancy Vogl)

Class Mobility (Bonnie Lockhart)

Darling Companion (Nancy Vogl)

People (Debbie Lempke)

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The full document attached to this post (see link on the upper right of this page) includes the front and back album covers, photos from the recording process, and lyrics to the songs on the album.