These Invisible Hands (2026)

Genre: Folk ballad

In 2016, my wife and I traveled to England and Scotland. As we sauntered up the Royal Mile towards Edinburgh Castle, we stumbled upon the unavoidable statue of Adam Smith, one of the city’s most famous residents and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in the same year as our Declaration of Independence, so Smith has been ushered into the great pantheon of American founding fathers despite having never set foot in America.

While Jefferson’s text enshrined our abiding political principles: inalienable rights, equality, consent of the governed, and the right of rebellion, Adam’s book did the equal for economics. In opposing the mercantilist system of the day, he introduced the concept of “division of labor,” the “invisible hand,” and advocated for free markets with a limited role for government. No wonder conservatives have championed Smith as the intellectual forebear of “free market capitalism.”

But it was on the same trip that I first heard the shocking tale of two notorious serial killers, Burke and Hare. Some 40 years after Smith’s death, this pair murdered 16 innocent people in that very same city, then sold the corpses of their victims to prideful men of science at the Royal College of Surgeons. The idea of these wicked crimes committed under the symbolic, watchful eye of the “father of modern economics” was too delicious to pass up. The seed of this song was sown.

I’m no fan of communism, but I also don’t believe in an unregulated free market as so many conservatives have held sacrosanct. (I don’t actually think Adam Smith did either.) In truth, capitalism is a great engine for producing wealth, but by definition, it generates winners and losers—great for the winners, not so much for the losers. We also know from historical precedent that an unrestrained free market often leads to consolidation of resources in the hands of a few, exploitation, wealth inequality, and obscene profit-making often at the expense of the public good. Supply and demand does not work flawlessly enough to “let the market decide” without the role of government as a referee, and wealth never “trickles down” as conservatives claim.

So, it was probably always in the cards that I would write this song as a rejoinder to Milton Friedman. The story of Burke and Hare seemed to me to be the perfect reductio ad absurdum argument against a marketplace given free rein to operate without constraint—“where even a corpse could be sold.”

The song I now refer to as my “Scottish murder ballad” was written during the COVID pandemic when I had plenty of time to work and rework the lyrics. I was also reading Homer at the time, so it borrows in both spirit and length (!) from the blind bard of antiquity.

Long, narrative ballads are not unprecedented in popular music. We had plenty of models when I was growing up: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (Gordon Lightfoot), The Ballad of Hattie Carroll (Bob Dylan), American Pie (Don McClean), Alice’s Restaurant (Arlo Guthrie), Rocky Raccoon (Beatles), and Ode to Billie Joe (Bobbie Gentry) to name a few.

I originally conceived of a ballad that detailed every single one of the 16 gruesome murders. That was over the top, even for me. Still, I felt I needed 16 verses to fully tell the story, and I liked the symbolic symmetry of one verse for every victim as a sign of respect for the dead.

My guitar-playing buddies prefer not to play this song in full and have asked me to cut some of the verses to shorten the song. It’s a very sensible and reasonable request, but I’ve given myself permission to be as self-indulgent as I wish. I’m afraid it will have to remain what it is: a very long story song.

To help the listener out, I’ve tried to minimize the length by speeding up the tempo of the song and cutting out the short interludes between verses. I also pulled the old production trick of changing the key in the middle of the tune to make it seem like there has been a change in an otherwise very repetitive song.

Finally, I decided to release “These Invisible Hands” in two separate parts (in the spirit of a serialized Victorian novel). Each installment contains eight of the 16 verses. “Serial 1” and “Serial 2” seemed an apt label for a story about two infamous 19C serial killers.

I hope it’s listenable. If not, maybe you’ll find the story engaging enough to want to learn more about the beautiful city of Edinburgh, its brief tenure as  “Athens of the North,” and about the two methodical killers who became a blot on the city’s legacy.