100,000 Demo
do you write long songs at dawn
I’ve logged many hours driving by myself across America, especially since the pandemic. There’s a meme I saw not long ago that pokes fun at how midwesterns will drive anywhere that’s within twelve hours, rather than fly, and I feel I am living proof.
My friend Rachel Kushner said to me recently that a highway is like a waiting room and that’s really stuck with me as I relate to this sentiment, but really only when I’m on tour. On tour, you just want to get there at all times. So sitting in a sprinter or trying to sleep on a bus for eight hours at a time does feel like a waiting room. But on a solo drive, where I get to make my own rules, I try my best to treat the highway as a sort of choose-your-own-adventure board game, where each highway exit is a different reality.
I make it a point to stop into towns I’ve never been to and wander around; Odessa, Amarillo, Salina, Coffeyville, Dodge City, etc. Towns that make a mid-sized American city look like Oz. I find a lot of comfort in these towns as they remind me of the small towns I grew up visiting my extended family in in Nebraska. Christmas was always spent in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, population 15,000 and summer trips spent in Petersburg, population a staggering 320 by the 2020 census! Though at the time of my childhood it was around 70, if memory serves.
If the highway is a waiting room, then the billboards are the stacks of magazines collecting in the corner of the room. And in the waiting room that is America, the stack of magazines is mainly filled with propaganda; GUNS AND AMMO, JESUS LOVES ALL BABIES, GOD IS WATCHING. All these alongside roadside attraction advertisements; FANTASTIC CAVERNS and LIVE TIGERS, etc.
Sometimes the billboards themselves become their own kind of poetry and I can’t tell you how many times i’ve passed certain billboards and noted to myself how it would make a good band name.
I daydream about the lives being lived in these small towns constantly. What’s going on there? Who lives there? Will they ever leave? Where will they go? What do they dream about?
In not wanting to repeat myself, I won’t go through all the details of how 100,000 came to be that I mentioned in my other post. But what I will say is that this song wore a few different hats before we finally found the one that fit it best. Below are two demos. One of me showing the song to Meg in their bedroom and them playing along with me as we sorta shape the song, and the other is the song as I wrote it before taking it to Meg.
Meg and I have a different version of this song that i’ll certainly release on it’s own, that’s very Meg-forward. I can’t wait to show you that someday, but in the meantime, enjoy these two demos! xoxo
PS: We have just reached the halfway point of our tour! 15 shows down, 15 to go on our North American run. The shows have been absolutely wonderful. Thank you all.
Come see us, tickets here.
