A little over a year ago, I was en route to Asheville for the workshop of The Maenads with American Myth Center. I had a notebook full of songs and ideas for the score, and Darth Prius was full of musical instruments. The fall color was stealing over the land, through the gray shadows of recent rain. It was a happy drive. 

Then, in the evening, around the time I crossed into Kentucky, a storm hit. I couldn't tell you exactly where; I wouldn't even be able to recognize that stretch of highway. Everything got so black so quickly that every last landmark was obscured. I thought I was driving on a raised roadbed until I saw the taillights of a car that had skidded up the embankment to my right. A little later on, horrifyingly, I found myself facing the headlights of another car that had spun out onto the median. From time to time the lightning would crack through, nuclear-blast bright, and then everything would plunge back to darkness while my retinas tried to adjust. It was fully apocalyptic, as though God himself had finally arrived for vengeance on Mitch McConnell. The car rocked with the force of the wind and rain. I wanted desperately to pull over but couldn't see a place where it was even possible. On my phone's GPS display, the estimated time of arrival began ticking up and up, further contributing to the nightmare sensation of slipping backward.

When the headlights found an exit sign that promised a motel, I pulled off, not even caring where I was. In the parking lot I sat and shook.

Later, in my room, I scrawled out a few ideas for a song. That's the dark blue writing on the verso page. Between songs for The Maenads, I made a few more attempts; that's the wine-red writing. A month or two after that, not thinking it was related, I jotted the line that would become the final chorus. It wasn't until I was in Taos this spring—after another long, solitary drive through empty spaces—that everything coalesced into "Bourbon Trail."  That's the blue writing on the recto side of the spread.

The end version abandoned both the original chord progression and the early melody. The lyrics are so elliptical that I wasn't certain they'd work until I tried them over a percussion loop. (The loop, btw, is supposed to evoke the sound of windshield wipers, though I don't know if it does that for anyone but me.) That somewhat structureless structure might be as close as I can get to recreating the sense of having the world melt away into nothing even as I had to keep going forward. 

P.S. I think anyone who's driven through the heartland will recognize the Adult Superstore sign—the sort of disconcerting landmark that looks halfway familiar no matter where you are—and will also know that the correct name is Lion's Den. I changed it mainly for the scansion—though I like the lower-rent feeling of "Bob's." Bob, whoever you are, wherever you are, no disrespect intended.

Sometimes you need to give a song space. This one needed literal space—the drafting process shifted from my pocket notebook to the much larger B5 cahier. The switch to bigger paper let me complete the song almost immediately. There was a gap for verse 3, and a pre-chorus line I wound up cutting the next day, but rewriting and reordering longhand has a lovely way of clarifying which ideas matter.

The song itself is destined for Posthistoric. I guess it's a pandemic love song? As much as anything I write is a love song right now?

The title, "Neowise," tells you when I started drafting this (though I did not know until just now, when I found that link, that NEOWISE is actually an acronym, so I guess I'll be capping it from now on). The comet's visibility coincided with my recovery from the kitchen accident that removed a tiny part of my left index finger; I was still playing guitar around a bandage when I wrote the pages on the left. Thus the "scissor off my fingertips" line in the bridge. I am, as you may know, deeply phobic about hand trauma. Despite that—or perhaps because of it—this is my favorite bridge in a long while.

The recording isn't done on this one yet. We tend to get a lot of arrangement ideas spontaneously in the rehearsal room, and being apart is slowing that down. But I like where it's going.

​"When I write lyrics, I often write in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style. I don't necessarily have a clear idea and so I don't always end up with something cohesive. In this case, what started out as a song about gender dysphoria & body dysmorphia—issues that have plagued me for 25 years—took a turn to condemn racism. From there, it branched off to discuss the Pharaoh's persecution of the Jews in Egypt, according to the stories of Passover. Then it jumps forward in time to discuss the KKK's appropriation of mythological and fantasy concepts as fodder for their internal structure. And then it brings the ten plagues of Egypt to the real world; a plea for god to strike down those who seek nothing but the destruction of those who are different from them. Somehow, I feel like it all works together. And also, as an atheist Jew who doesn't even remotely take the Torah or the bible literally, I'm not actually wishing death upon anyone. Merely telling a story, as I always do."

The song is called "Makot Miztrayim," the Hebrew term for the ten plagues of Egypt. It is due to release on Halloween.