Now that Bernie Sanders is officially running for President, his folk album from 1987 will get a new and wider airing. Photograph by Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty

Bernie Sanders, the Independent socialist senator from Vermont and now Democratic Presidential candidate, is a serious man and a welcome addition to the 2016 race. Which is to say that, in the first week of his extremely long-shot challenge to Hillary Clinton, he deserves better than for us to dwell on an indiscretion that he committed nearly thirty years ago, in 1987, when, in the course of two nights in a Burlington studio, he recorded a five-song folk album called “We Shall Overcome.”

On Thursday, Jonathan Karl, a reporter for ABC News, played a few seconds of a song off the album for Sanders on his phone. The seventy-three-year-old senator laughed gamely but tried to move the conversation along. “Look I’m worried about your viewing audience,” he said. “You’ll have mass click-offs. You don’t want me singing.”

Maybe we do. Here’s a bit of his version of “This Land Is Your Land.”

The Senator may underestimate the audience-enhancing possibilities of Internet virality, but he is probably correct to want to avoid being pinned down by this novelty, at a time when his very candidacy is being dismissed by some as just that. When the short album was rediscovered last year, by the Vermont alternative weekly Seven Days, it made brief rounds as a political curio, but now that Sanders is officially running for President, the songs will get a new and wider airing.

Sanders is likely to come in for some ridicule from the ungenerous. While he never quite sings (the producer is said to have nixed that early on), he performs spoken-word monologues in his ur-Brooklyn accent—transcription utterly fails to capture his pronunciation of words like “marble” or “door”—backed by a chorus of thirty capable singers. At the time, Sanders described the intended effect as a localized version of “We Are the World,” and that gets it right. The smooth, blue-eyed folk spirituals conjure a different time and place—not necessarily the hardscrabble life and times of Woody Guthrie but rather a less disadvantaged era characterized by the Moosewood Cookbook and Volvos with rear-facing back seats.

As for embarrassing songs to be caught singing in 1987, however, Sanders could have done much worse: it’s not as if he was doing karaoke versions of “Walk Like an Egyptian” or “I Think We’re Alone Now.” The album is a little batty in places: on “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” Sanders opines about the threat of dangerous “laser beams” and warns against a coming Third World War. But, if you can get past the earnest bombast of the whole project, it sounds a lot like Sanders’s current progressive economic agenda—a musical accompaniment to his policy positions of supporting unions, raising the minimum wage, and reforming the tax code to make wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fairer share.

In some ways, the album is a campaign consultant’s dream: on message, catchy, humanizing. (He’ll be lip-synching on Fallon by next week!) “Most of the people in this world work hard their entire lives and end up with very little. Others exploit that labor and end up with millions,” Sanders says on “The Banks of Marble.” He’s saying the same thing today, just without the backup singers.

The album could conceivably give Sanders a kind of unexpected credibility as a national candidate. The mortifying musical performance has itself become a required act for ambitious American politicians. Just the short list includes such ear gougers as Bill Clinton singing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in Israel; former Attorney General John Ashcroft letting his broken eagle soar; Trent Lott “boom-bop-a-bowing” some white-boy doo-wop with the Singing Senators; George W. Bush donning a cowboy hat and white tie for a parody of “Green, Green Grass of Home”; John McCain warbling Streisand on “Saturday Night Live”; and Barack Obama scoring with a few credible bars of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” and falling flat on “Sweet Home Chicago.”

This is not to suggest that we need more singing politicians. (Marco Rubio wrote in his memoir about singing a Lionel Richie song at his high-school talent show, Mike Huckabee and Martin O’Malley are never far away from their guitars, and Ted Cruz did this.) But if we are to suffer in this corner of political inanity, I’d prefer to do it with Sanders, who on his recording of “We Shall Overcome” identified the problems facing the world: “War, starvation, the degradation of our environment, people being manipulated and lulled into a stupor by the mass media, consumerism, the futile striving for happiness by earning more and more money to buy more and more things—and on and on it goes.” I think he’s found his campaign song.