Polka dot dresses swirl through the mind in tail finned gas swilling automobiles. Iced beers drip in sunshine, drive in movie screens show black and white flicks over slicked back black hair and blonde lipstick curls. This is cherry coke sweet. Polished like high chrome in saccharine shades.
music
Nashville has an ego. Lights, signs and neons all big as that ego with history gone to it’s head. It’s been ‘Music City – USA’ since WSM AM radio cast out it’s shout over 38 states with weekly live shows and recordings. Broadcasts began in 1925, name was claimed 1950 set against rock and roll. ‘Birthplace of bluegrass’, ‘home of country music’, ‘songwriting capital of the world’; There’s plenty of others to pick from.
A full blood moon’s hanging thick over Rockies. Earlier on I saw dinosaur steps and bones, pressed into layers of once-flat beach sand that turned into mud that turned into rock that turned to upended slabs that jut out of the sides of sharp mountains. What was flat nearly upright. What was beach now a cliff. And everything round me got here out of chaos.
Now I’m sat between ridges and ranges and chaos is here in the house… It’s been in my ears and it’s been in car stereos and it’s given long journeys brief fever. Slumb Party’s ‘Happy Now’ is breakneck in pace and in place of a thrill is a pupil dilation from trying to make sense of each track; these things pass quicker than oncoming cars at a speed that I don’t want to print.
I’m a semi permanently disgruntled ass, verging on childishly excitable. I’m vein, over confident and egotistical. I’m a self deprecating jangle of nerves. I’ve just about learnt to get comfy with me and now someone else has to too, and oh does she get my sympathy.
Rats on Run began here, in more ways than one. Took five years to work out what to do with the offer…
A man I barely knew and his American wife said come stay in the states anytime. He left UK for US and with wife and new life they’re deservedly proud; of each other, their changes, their hard graft and payoffs.
I was midway through a write up of their 2017 releases when a new track came landed and knocked them away. Last year saw Victories let ‘Wiccan’ and ‘Mandy Machine’ loose on raw ears, now it’s ‘Fork in the Road’s turn to tear up. The first two are singles I dug out of Spotify. The latter a live video so far streaming only. Their catalogue backs up to 2010.
For a fact off the bat; Each release gets tighter, gets more taught and tougher. In scope and conviction, songcraft, execution. It’s a clear pitched trajectory and timeline and motion.
Cape Canaveral, Florida to Nashville, Tennessee; 740 odd miles in 90+ degrees F in a car with no AC, no fuel gauge, leaking break fluid and no radio. A cheap Bluetooth speaker spits out spike tin-whispers of anything with treble enough to push through the wind, windows full down, seats wet from heat. Sweat gathers neatly in all troughs of skin and that cheap tin of wasps keeps on humming.
It’s bigger here, faster. SUV bumpers ride up to my hips, steaks come in slabs as bloated as fists and talk runs at rates that I can’t penetrate. Wide open spaces with every bit packed up and built on and everyone got to get first. Southern Rock dominates each bar I find, bloated like those steaks but with half less to chew on.
Exit to Mexico Beach. Highway 98 so long, straight and one-laned a road that it’s easy to drift down its high-pine lined stretch. Got told it’s a shifted down, stripped down beach front, without the rude lights and the half builts and built up. Air smelt a little cleaner there.
From white sand that drops steep into warm green sea water I caught earshot of whoops and applause. I dried off to move to the source.
If a Maybe’s all the will or won’ts
You got
And Sometime’s as good as any
Or it’s not
If Perhaps is all the promise
That you’re after
Maybe Someplace, hurting hurts
But not a lot.
Rats on the Run 