I wrote this song about a year ago and attempted a recording of it last summer. It totally face-planted into a turgid, reverb-soaked mess. This song was part of what made me so sick of my creative shit and launched me into an uptempo vibe for six months just to break free of it. Like, how long can one circle the downtempo drain before going absolutely insane? It’s an occupational hazard I tell you.
Yet somehow, I’m back in the Land of Little Rain. Dreams and musical inspiration change like the seasons I guess. This song is about a lot of things but was originally inspired by Neko Case’s 2006 song “Dirty Knife.” I find the lyrics to that song absolutely inscrutable and yet for some reason, they conjure up vivid images of the last hours of Meriwether Lewis. I don’t think that’s the correct reading her lyrics at all, but it struck me as something cool to write about. If I could that is.
One day last winter, I got this freaky download of images and feelings around Lewis’ presumed suicide on the Natchez Trace. It suddenly felt personal and emotionally accessible. What would it be like to have traveled across the USA and back, seen all this amazing stuff, only to be shuffled off into an administrative job and suffer mental illness and alcoholism at a time when the culture had no way of dealing with it? And, be romantically spurned because you’re a neurodivergent weirdo. Framed in this way, his fate jumps out of the foggy myth of history and becomes a very relatable human story, one you can see everyday across this fragmented mess of a country…
Natchez Trace (demo)
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