The following is a piece of road-journal that I chopped a bit and tried to turn into an album write-up. Pardon its fragmentation.
It’s 1pm on Christmas Eve. I’m supine in the back of a spacious-enough Toyota Matrix barreling down the I-10 somewhere in Texas, swaddled in the scant sleeping equipment of three road-weary existential warriors. We’re about 8 hours into a 30ish-hour drive home from New Orleans. Two of us are driving in shifts, as the third chose to go her own way. We left her in the French Quarter with the end of a Jim Beam bottle and a “so long”.
Aside from a 30-minute detour back to Austin to catch one last breath in the city that made itself the highlight of our trip not a week earlier, we had no time to kill the cruise control (save for filling up and making water, of course, of course).
Anyway, I’m set comfortably enough to both enjoy the desert flowers and to nod off when the mood strikes (sleep becomes valuable in these situations). My last-legs iPod is hanging on with enough battery life to get us through one more album, and right now it’s The Strange Boys’ “Be Brave”.
With Austin on the mind and in the heart, we survivors of the Big Easy find it fitting to reach El Paso with the strained croons of Ryan Sambol and the bluesy jams of what now seems a fitting Texas death march. The band is from Austin—if I didn’t know this before the trip, the multiple incidental encounters with them in diners and bars across downtown Austin removed the doubt.
The album’s a bit different from “The Strange Boys and Girls Club” (pick that up if you haven’t yet) in that it’s slightly more placid. It’s got a sense of heart that carries the flow of things without pulling them away from you. It’s not quick enough to remind you that you’ll soon be back in California with the same problems you left there. The apartment’s still a mess, as it were. It’s sweet in that it allows you to decompress and to cope with the idea that Austin’s done for a while and that you probably won’t make SXSW—at least not this year.
“I’m sorry that I played your piano, but I just had to get somethin’ off of my soul”
It’s a slick album we’re hearing. You might call it “cool”, I guess. But the progression it makes from the playful title track at the beginning to the honesty of “The Unsent Letter” gives it a sense of genuineness that no amount of Pitchfork praise can break.
We hated New Orleans enough to cut the trip short to maybe make it home for Christmas. This drive back is reminding us of the things we didn’t get to do, and it’s showing us how small a distance we really ended up going. I think the most obvious thing to me now is that no matter how vast and countless the mile markers and rest stops and cactus flowers and shrub bugs seem, we’re still just around the corner from the things we tried to shake.
Drive in one direction for a few days, but you’ll still find yourself home on Christmas morning.
-Drew
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