660 no cure

Bike Lane

I’m very conflicted as to how much to talk about Bike Lane on Record Store. Part of me feels like you all did not sign up for my shameless self-promotion, but another part recognizes that what makes me an interesting non-fiction writer also makes me an interesting songwriter and vice versa; the two are inextricable. Also, to be totally frank, I think the music is good and if I had discovered it today, it would probably end up on a playlist tomorrow—at least I would like to think so.

Wake Up in the Weeds (2022) came out yesterday. I wrote a sappy little Instagram post about how grateful I am for everyone in my life that facilitated this record coming to fruition, so I won’t repeat myself here. I’ll just say that it’s very surreal to have birthed my first child into the world by refreshing my Spotify at 9pm on a Thursday night. I can’t believe they just let anyone put music on the Internet these days; it was almost too easy. That being said, this album represents more than two years of writing and recording and regularly driving six hours down to L.A.—the three ingredients in any good record.

Blake and I met in the fall of 2018, when we were both living in Berkeley, introduced by a close friend at a late afternoon backyard party. I remember meeting him, which is really saying something because today I forgot what month it is and yesterday I couldn’t remember the word for popsicle. We exchanged numbers and both got busy, and by the time I reached out to say that I would love to hang out and make music sometime, he had already moved down to L.A. I figured I had blown it, and I was resigned to never working with him.

In the fall of the next year, I started a band called Buttermother with some college friends. When we decided to record some of our songs over winter break, my guitarist and bassist said they knew a guy with some recording experience down in L.A. Against incredible odds, if you know anything about this city, that guy turned out to be Blake. I had become a fan of his solo project Von Thrasher, and after recording that December, we kept in closer touch.

In the pandemic summer, I texted him a very early demo of what became “Garden,” the opener on Wake Up in the Weeds. He made a very strange double time version initially that I hated, and I told him so. He took one more pass at it and that version is basically what you hear on the record. I joked that we should start a band called Bike Lane, because I had taken to riding my bike for hours everyday to pass the time. He took me seriously, and I started writing in earnest.

I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to say exactly what this record is about. There are the obvious, but not superficial, layers—it’s about the Bay Area, it’s about a whole bunch of poetic nonsense, it’s about being afraid of change. Then just a bit below that surface is the material about wanting and losing and longing, the bits that are akin to the records that inspired it—I Was Born Swimming (2020), Blue (1971), Punisher (2020), Sleep Well Beast (2017), Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2001), Are We There (2014), In Rainbows (2007)—basically I wrote a bunch of sad love songs.

While it’s true that I have changed dramatically in the two years since I wrote Wake Up in the Weeds, I can absolutely recognize myself in the writing and know I have the capacity to feel that desperate again. That fixation seems to be a part of my personality that I can quell but never eradicate. I’ve also ceased to be interested in being less intense; those huge feelings, like waves that I fear will drown me, are what make listening to music so rewarding. When I hear a line that puts words to something that I’ve experienced but never expressed, it feels like all of those sad and scary moments are worth it, tenfold.

I’ve heard that we write the songs that we need to hear. I’m not sure if that statement holds water for everyone, but I know that I was looking for this album two years ago and didn’t find it. These songs are stuffed so full of little moments of my actual life that I feel I am reaching back in time and pulling myself out from under the waves, the buoy of a promise of making something concrete out of all that time that I felt lost and alone.

I think I like this record; anyone who has ever made music knows that you like a song for the first ten minutes after you write it and have a basically downhill trajectory that bottoms out with feeling dead neutral, a complete loss of objectivity. But I believe that the writing and production are good and the way that it became larger than Blake and me has been beautiful and terrifying. It took on a shape that I did not consciously intend, but I love it all the same. I hope you love it too.