Some of the first records Ry Cooder heard and loved as a child were Woody Guthrie’s songs about working-class people in the Great Depression. He never quite got them out of his system. There has been a strain of social commentary in his albums, going back to his solo debut, when he covered Guthrie’s “Do Re Mi” and Alfred Reed’s “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?”


These days, however, he’s taking his protest music and social-commentary blues to a new level. Last year Mr. Cooder, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat and supporter of unions, put out an album called “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down,” which took aim at Wall Street bankers, war profiteers and anti-immigrant vigilantes.


On Tuesday he released a follow-up, “Election Special” (Nonesuch), in which he pokes fun at Mitt Romney, the Republican Party and the Koch brothers, the Kansas industrialists who back the Tea Party movement and other conservative causes. In a telephone interview from his home in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Cooder, 65, talked about writing protest music and his need for acupuncture and French classical music to relax in such troubling times. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.


Q. What possessed you to write “Mutt Romney,” a song that imagines life as Mr. Romney’s dog?


A. It just seemed we should hear from the dog, you know. Quite a useful character, a dog is, when you view it in the light of the blues. Like a servant, a yardman, someone very low in the social order. He’s just begging to be let down [from the car roof].


Q. Another song describes two businessmen who make a deal with the Devil. Are you talking about the Koch brothers?


A. Yeah, I thought how could you — in a song phrase — explain them? Then I thought the crossroads. Everybody understands that. I thought, That’s how I’ll start: “We made the deal, and Satan’s deal was good, ’cause he said we could have all that horrible power and do anything we want.” But Satan’s price is he’ll come for one of the Koch brothers and take him back down. He won’t say which one. He won’t say when.


Q. A couple of songs refer to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Do you think that movement has any steam left?


A. The only way we are going to save the country from these bastards is unity and solidarity, and the conservatives went after unity and solidarity when they started to dismantle the labor force under Reagan. The Occupy movement seems to be a force for unity. People who get together, regardless of other structures, will find something in common. They are bound to. That was the Pete Seeger let’s-all-sing theory.


Q. In “Kool-Aid” you seem to pick up a theme you explored in your last album: the idea of poor whites who have been let down by the politicians they have supported.


A. Your poor white people — conservatives want to split them off and say, “We are going to engineer it so these people will vote against their own self-interest.” But this character in the “Kool-Aid” song says I did everything that was asked of me but I’m still losing my job and I’m going to lose my house. Finally, it occurs to him at 3 o’clock in the morning, what my friend Jim Dickinson used to call the moment of the horrible hillbilly reality, as his wife’s asleep and he’s smoking Chesterfields, and he says: “Wait a minute — this didn’t work at all. I’m hung out to dry. I’m twisting in the wind. I drank the Kool-Aid.”


Q. This album’s pretty pessimistic. Do you really think the country has reached such a critical crossroads?


A. Is there anybody who would doubt it if you look at the facts in the case? All you have to do is open up your ears to anything you are hearing, reading, watching on these blogs. I listen to the Pacifica station. I have to say I’m getting so saturated, so anxious, I have to go to acupuncture three mornings a week now to keep the tension down.


Q. Do you have any plans to do concerts or sing at rallies this election season?


A. I’d like to. I did a little union show recently for this longshoremen’s union up in San Francisco. They were having a labor fest. Old-time union people. And they got it. So I thought what I should do is go out and play for small groups, because big groups are so diffuse that you feel like you’re just singing to dead air. And you can’t really connect. I can’t anyway.


Q. Are these songs that Woody Guthrie would sing if he were alive?


A. Possibly. The same stories are being told. Woody Guthries’s songs, or Uncle Dave Macon to a certain extent, or some of the stuff the New Lost City Ramblers used to do, you could be doing right now. Because they talked about the banks, about the bigness of money, about the failure to create jobs. I don’t see any difference.


Q. What do you listen to these days? Do you go back to those old folk records?


A. You mean in a recreational sense? I like classical music. I especially like the French composers. Ravel, in particular. Debussy. That’s so soothing in a nervous world. And I like the Mexican Norteño stuff. I listen to jazz all the time — beautiful bebop and swing music. Nat King Cole — I listen to him a lot. And bluegrass. Country hillbilly music I love. Always have. Ray Price. Jimmy Martin. I love the Louvin Brothers. You got to listen to that stuff forever.


Q. Your last two records are the most topical you’ve ever done. Why so? Is that liberating?


A. If you don’t have some creative outlet for yourself, I’m sorry, you’re going to be in trouble, because there is so much that’s coming. A person like me, I’m just going to sit here and go mad and pound the table. And that’s no good. Then you have to see the acupuncturist five days a week.