If memory serves, we debuted this song last January at Theater Wit, after a circus variety show, and I think it was a part of every live set last year. It's a fun one live, with a sort of stealthy groove. We don't have a studio recording of it yet, though, and I'm honestly not sure where such a recording would go. It could be on the expanded Highway Gothic LP—I wrote this more or less while Charlie was mixing and mastering that album—or it could wind up on Posthistoric. Whatever. That's a problem for Future Liz.

Anyway, this is one of those rare triumphs in which you find a home for a stray line. (Cue Sarah McLachlan: "Most stray lines expire, neglected, forgotten, starving...") I originally wrote the line about the room with the pill-bottle smell in 2017, I think, at least a year before the rest of the song—not even in this notebook. By the time I wrote this, I had already tried to shoehorn that line into something else and tried to build a melody around it; neither worked. (There are vestiges of that melody in the do-re-mi-re-do-ti that ends the first and second lines of these verses.) But when the idea for this song arrived, it was almost immediately clear that the pill-bottle room had found its place.

The spark for this one was what turned out to be the chorus: 
You say you'll get better
You say you'll get better
I'm bored with this story
Tell me more.
It has evolved into "these stories" but is otherwise intact. The position of those lyrics on the recto page, scrawly and spaced out, is the tell. Now that I've had to start working in different notebooks, I usually write the spark ideas on the verso, to preserve the staff paper for actual music. I'm still not convinced that approach is working. But that's another problem for Future Liz.

Just a scrap today. This isn't part of the song "Posthistoric"—that's done, I think, at least on the lyrics front—but it's very much of a piece with that writing process, and probably has a place on the album. Somewhere. It's hard to know. It's hard to know much of anything these days, innit?

Oh, boy, this song is trying SO hard to happen. 

It began as something half-dreamed. Melodies often visit when I'm in a hypnagogic state ("White Flag" started that way, for example). Sometimes I have a moment of being conscious enough to register that I'm hearing a song that I need to write down. Sometimes it takes a while to figure out that the song doesn't already exist in the world—and these doubts can persist for a long while. Sometimes, I assume, I just fall asleep, and the song vanishes into whatever world of ghosts almost-songs inhabit.

Anyway, this is a song specifically about the dissolution of borders between sleeping and waking, unknowing and knowing, and that...really seems to have made it harder to write.

The different colors of ink speak to the number of writing sessions; the curly brackets and misspellings, to the uncertainty and distraction. 

I made it extra complicated for myself by attempting to work on this in Taos, having left the first sleepy notes in Chicago. So this is an excavation of what might or might not be a memory.

I'd like to think I can finish this one. I still like the original idea (the lines beginning "when the barriers evaporate"), and it fits thematically with a lot of the other pieces for Posthistoric/Backroads. But I think I'm going to have to start over on a fresh piece of paper.

My great-uncle Baz died before I was born, but he is legendary in the family. Among other things, he served in both world wars. In 1919, he completed the first Transcontinental Air Race (which claimed seven lives). In WWII—as a colonel—he went AWOL from where he was supposed to be so that he could jump with the paratroopers on D-Day. (It was his first parachute jump; he was 51.) He also played a season as a minor-league catcher and got an engineering degree from MIT. As you do.

In WWI, he flew over 100 missions as an observer (a combined spy/gunner in the rear seat of a two-seater). It was hazardous, not only because the Germans were taking special aim at the observers but also because aviation still had a lot of kinks yet to be ironed out. Some had fuel tanks that could skid into the pilot if the flight angle changed too sharply. More than once, Baz had to climb out onto the tail to balance the plane on landing.

Some crashes couldn't be avoided. Baz diagrammed one in a letter home, shown here as duplicated in his daughter's book:

The plane flipped forward over the nose, and Baz and his French pilot found themselves upside down, still strapped in. After making sure they were both all right, the pilot said, "C'est la guerre, Bagby, donnez-moi un cigarette."

And THAT is for sure a song. The melody it suggests to me is straight out of a dingy French dance hall, which is not the sort of thing I usually write, but which is just fine for an album called Posthistoric that may well be coming out on or about the end date for American civilization. I'm still drafting the lyrics—and kindly refrain from judging my first-draft French grammar—but here's where things stand.

Damn right there's a key change. Bienvenue à l'enfer, c'est la guerre.