Badlands Demo
heaven is a thunderstorm
One thing about living in the Midwest is that it’s wise to have a basement, should a tornado ever come your way. Growing up in Tornado Alley it felt imperative when buying a home, especially in Kansas City, where basements are common.
A few years ago Katie and I bought a mid century ranch style house, that feels somewhat like living inside an aquarium. Before we closed we lead my parents through a walk through and my mom protested the buying of the house, saying it was unsafe, as it did not have a basement and was built on a slab.
I did my best to explain to my mom that we didn’t need a basement as I reminded her of all the close calls we’ve had with tornados over the years and how no matter how scary, we were never in the direct path of one.
All this just to say that two weeks after we bought the basementless house I had just arrived back home from a European tour and was very jet lagged. On one of my first nights back in the new house Katie and I were woken up by tornado sirens at three in the morning.
I was so jetlagged that I actually believed, for a moment, that I was still in France, and although I was aware that the sirens were going off in Kansas City, I felt we were safe since we were somehow in Paris. But once I snapped out of this delirium I realized the gravity of our situation; being inside a glass house that has no basement with a tornado headed our direction.
I had remembered my mom during the walk through telling Katie and I that if ever a tornado should appear we should hide in the closet in the guest room, and so I told Katie to go there, as I turned the TV on in the living room.
Through the screen came the live broadcast of a weatherman shouting to seek cover immediately as the tornado was moving east, headed right for our neck of the woods. Feeling so panicked I didn’t know what to do I began flickering our living room lights. I’m still not exactly sure what I hoped this might accomplish. Maybe that a new neighbor would see it as a distress signal and come save us? No one came to our rescue.
But in the end the sirens turned off and we went back to bed, a little shaken up. Turns out the tornado did touch-down though, stripping the rooftop of a church only a few blocks south of us.
Months later I was doom scrolling when I came across a repost of a video that was going viral of a teenage kid walking around his neighborhood as multiple tornado sirens accidentally began harmonizing with one another. I still don’t know the credibility or how real this video even is, but the idea was incredibly moving and beautiful to me; harmonizing tornado sirens. A harmonious warning, like the sound one might here right before the earth is swallowed by the sun.
It’s easy to assume that hell may be a never ending storm. Terrifying claps of thunder throwing violent bolts of lightning through the blinding rain. But one could also imagine a thunderstorm in heaven, viewed from a porch, watching it flicker across the sky, the hands of god coming down. I’ve long loved watching storms in the distance across the open plains…the rain clouds look like jellyfish slowly moving through the sky.
The middle of the country can be very very ugly at times, but i’ve long felt that within that ugliness lives something very beautiful, as if almost unintentionally beautiful, and very distinctly American. It’s beauty may not be as immediate as other places, but it is there, if you search for it.
I put all of this into Badlands the best I could. It was maybe my favorite song to watch come to life in Aarons studio and the one I was most excited to take in. Here’s a few demos below of it’s evolution as a demo over the years before capturing it for good.
The two demos, beneath the paywall.
“Badlands electric” as it’s written in my files. From May 16 2023. This is me singing through a small amp and playing electric guitar while recording it on my phone in the living room of my studio.
“Badlands Piano” from Nov 23 2023. I like this one a lot as it reminds me of an old Microphones song.
LOVE U ALL! ENJOY!
