April 25th - Jeff Davis County Blues

There's something especially American about the aimless road trip, the small towns flitted through when you're going not towards but away, places that must have their own life but which you only experience as lonely and quiet stops on the way towards you don't know what.

One of the things that I'm not sure many people from my own country fully appreciate about America, even if they intellectually know it, is how much of it is the empty spaces between points. You read books on trips like this, you listen to Orville peck, and you think you get just how far it can be from a town to another identical town, but you don;'t know how long the roads can get. My wife and I in our younger years used to drive for eight hours on a Friday night to get to her old home town, hang out with people all day Saturday, and then drive eight hours back on Sunday. God, being in my twenties was weird.

But always I was heading towards something. There's something else again about the feeling that you need to keep moving for something to do but you don't have a place you're supposed to be. There's a moment in this song where the narrator crosses a state line he clearly wasn't supposed to cross, not because of an urgent need to get somewhere but from an urgent need to move.

Wherever home was, I hope he got there. And I hope it was still home.