We’re doing it again. A quick explanation:
The idea here is to make a compilation album charting the course of a particular month—October, in this case. Part of the idea is having a good arc to it—this is why it’s an album and not a playlist; there’s a Side A and a Side B—and part of it is trying to capture the different emotions of a month in music. The biggest part, though, is that songs are a good jumping off place for writing about things that aren’t songs, at least for me. Consider this the on-site creative writing gym for The Barking Crow.
This month’s tracklist is as follows, and if you use Spotify, you can listen to it in playlist form here.
Side A
1. “Highwayman” – The Highwaymen
2. “My Oh My” – Macklemore, Ryan Lewis
3. “Human” – The Killers
4. “Spaceman” – The Killers
5. “Cover Me Up” – Jason Isbell
Side B
6. “Don’t Change Your Plans” – Ben Folds Five
7. “All My Days” – Alexi Murdoch
8. “A Dustland Fairytale” – The Killers
9. “Friday I’m in Love” – Phoebe Bridgers
10. “I Can’t Stay” – The Killers
Today, we begin with Track 1:
***
People tell me Austin’s changed, and I believe them, but it’s a bit funny when they tell me that, because they’re usually the folks I pick up for Lyft rides from big new houses west of town. I’m the new blood—the young white guy, rather short-haired now, come down on his ancestors’ dime from Chicago or thereabouts, living in a place that, nice old neighborhood and all, has a lot of light coming through that front door. I’m a type, one of many flocking to the place, and you could even say I work in the tech industry, digital media and online retail and I guess even rideshare and the world of food delivery apps.
Of course, I’m not really their type on that. I’m not working for Facebook. I’m not a consultant consulting Facebook. I’m a creative, the kind of person they’re allegedly lamenting with their complaints, someone driving them to dinner at 7:00 after they finished work for the proverbial accounting firm at 5:00 so I can afford to sit here at 1:00 in the morning, writing about Willie Nelson and his friends. I don’t wear cowboy boots or play the guitar (my bass is up in Illinois, waiting for the next time I make the drive), but there’s an argument to be made that I’m what Austin’s supposedly lost.
Of course, it’s broader than being a creative, and even if you hold that definition, I’m a twist on it. Austin was never about the grind. It was a hippie town, a good town if you were a nudist, a great town if you were a nudist who wanted to play the bongos in the middle of the night in the comfort of your own home (maybe the fact he got arrested for that was the first sign things were going to shit around here; maybe if we elected him governor for that it would bring the place back). There are plenty of towns where you can grind it out so you can write about Texas football and Willie Nelson on the internet. Austin wasn’t really about that. But again, between me and the proverbial accounting firm…at least there’s a piece of me reflecting them all back into the past.
Of course, I’m not here for an Austin-bona-fides pissing contest. That doesn’t interest me much from an ego sense. I don’t have much spiritual here in Austin, at least on the Austin side. All my Austin spirituality comes from within, from the feeling of walking across the Congress Avenue bridge in the mist three falls ago, looking up at the skyline and thinking maybe this would be the place, this place that seemed comfortable with the concept of ambition. But it does interest me conceptually. Because there’s that piece of Austin that just won’t die.
There are a lot of places with that quality to them. They’ll all die eventually, sure, but how much can a place really change? Los Angeles will always glitter with dreams. New York will always crawl with exhaustion and might. Boston will always pipe its little head up, defiant until the last, a chipmunk defending a burrow no one cares to take. Austin will always have that blue-collar-liberal style of relaxation to it. They could close Barton Springs, but the Continental Club would still be there. They could close the Continental Club, but the Scoot Inn would keep on rocking. They could close the Scoot Inn, but the moontowers would still stand, sentries against time. They could tear down the moontowers, but they couldn’t tear down Mount Bonnell. On one side of town, the peacocks will still strut around Mayfield Park. On the other, Huston-Tillotson will continue to fulfill its mission. They’ll rip out every last house on the East Side and drop a box of condos in its place. They’ll renovate all that shit they built in the 80’s that stopped being suburban last decade and scatter a few more coffeeshops in the middle sometime. They’ll keep slapping the glass onto new skyscrapers, another one finished every month or two. But there’ll still be plenty of Austin in Austin.
It’s a comforting thought, and it’s a true thought, and I suppose those are two of the reasons the idea of reincarnation has been so appealing to mankind throughout the ages. For as much as we change things, we don’t want things to change, and we certainly don’t want to say goodbye to things we’re fond of, even if we actively drive them out. With fear of the unknown such a presence in our psyche, there’s a corresponding comfort in the known, whether it be a soul or an idea or some spiritual thread, woven through time by way of swimming holes and supper clubs and big old towers with big white lights up on top of ‘em.
Austin is on display this weekend. There are a lot of folks in town right now. They skitter around in the morning, then start making their way to Zilker Park by midday. By evening, they’re all in there, and the city goes quiet for a few hours until they emerge in a daze, mostly headed back to Airbnb’s to sleep it all off until they circle back tomorrow. It’s ACL weekend, the first of the two ACL weekends, and people are here being in Austin and thinking about Austin who usually are not in Austin and are not thinking about Austin. It’s a distinct feeling, to be thought of, to be a place where events happen, to be a destination, and it sometimes brings up that feeling of walking across the Congress Avenue bridge in the mist, when Austin was a destination for me, a cocky and hopeful Midwesterner trying to figure out a whole lot of shit. And while it’s fair to say that Austin is growing for the same reasons The Woodlands are growing over by Houston—tax rates and open land, open land and tax rates—those aren’t the reasons Austin is a destination. The reasons are those spiritual threads—the ones you find in the swimming holes, or lit up on a hot summer night by a moontower on the East Side. Without those threads, there’s no music festival this weekend. Without those threads, people who say Austin’s changed are just talking about nothing. They take on different forms—the tie from Stevie Ray Vaughan to the dorkiest corner of South by Southwest is rather direct, but whatever SXSW begets will be that much more difficult to trace back through the years—but they’re there. They remain. And they’ll be back again (“and again, and again, and again…”).
And so I listen to Willie Nelson, and I listen to his friends, and I listen to them sing about reincarnation, even though Wikipedia says Johnny Cash didn’t know that’s what the song was about when he sang it. And I take some comfort in it, and I take some truth in it.
For it may simply be a single drop of rain.
But it will remain.
