Big Thief, road trips, and coming alive.

"Wake Me Up to Drive" on repeat and the freedom of a drive.

Lately Big Thief is who I’ve been running to, in particular their 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. With 22 songs, it’s a big one, but two of my favorites are some of the shortest tracks: “Big Bend” and “Wake Me Up to Drive.” The past few days the latter has been on repeat.

Let’s keep on moving down the track
And if the horse lies down
There’s a push just a mile uptown
If the horse lies down

Wake me up to drive, wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired, I don’t wanna miss a ride

I just finished the 2-mile walk from the A train back to my apartment on this gray April afternoon, pausing under various trees on my way home to finish up the final lines for this letter in a text message to myself. If I’m honest, I’ll probably listen a few more times once I send this out and get over to the gym.

What I love about the song is how it takes me right into the heart of what it felt like to be on an aimless drive growing up and the freedom of, upon leaving home, finally being able to go unchecked on the road for hours and days if we wanted. Sleeping in those cars. Smoking in them. Having sex. Trespassing. Visiting each other. Crying, confessing, fighting. What it meant to be able to load up a car and just go, dollar bills being passed over the seat and crumpled together into some sort of legible pile of currency to fill up and buy a giant bag of fried plantains to share and maybe use someone’s fake to get a few 40s as we went on and on and on.

I never did get a car of my own, but a few of my friends had them, and my boyfriend throughout college, and the boyfriends after that. What I mean by this is that I was often shotgun, meaning I got to be taken along. Usually, this also meant I got to DJ. The car radio was how I got to know my friends better, how we showed each other where we were at inside our hearts, often quite sad, and how we could first talk about being in love. There is such intimacy of sharing music through a car radio, which Dijon holds perfectly in “Talk Down” (his Coachella slowed-down performance of that song was just so, so gorgeous, another one I’ve been replaying a lot since the live recording was released last week).

But I think I’ve been thinking a lot about the car as a psychic place these days mostly because my book has some of its most significant scenes set in a car, on a trip, in transit. Friends loaded in, music narrating life, what can’t be said aloud shared through song.

Hand upon my skin
Warm me up, and calm me down
I like to watch your chin
Chasing the familiar sound
Of a famous song
Put one on, let’s sing along
To the famous song

Wake me up to drive, wake me up to drive
Even if I’m tired, I don’t wanna miss a ride

Yeah. The soft, dreamy way Adrianne Lenker takes you into the felt sense of eyes flicking open, the way a once absent heart can slip back seamlessly the moment it’s shaken awake simply because the hand that’s shaking them knows the value of what could be missed. Which is just…nothing. Just being in a car. Just driving on. Just listening together. Don’t miss that, it’s everything, the song seems to be saying.

If you’re an artist of any kind you know of the fallow periods and what it’s like to be the only one who believes. The temptation of transforming or contorting yourself into a mirror of what’s popular or trendy or celebrated or safe and to know you must walk your own way. Even if it’s a quiet way, for now. To keep walking even as those around you flinch with fear. Even as you flinch with fear—walk your own way. Build your own life, your vision, your heart. Art, writing, it’s more than production. Hobby. It’s a way of being. There are so many who fear the cave—good, God. Don’t. I say this just as much for another who might need it as I do for myself.

My book gave me a home when everything I knew as home dissolved and took a new shape, time and time again. The book taught me to fall and have the grace to let another lift you. To go places others feared to go. To know the hands that were always meant to hold you will find you. They will.

It’s a book about road trips, indie bands, and friendship. It’s a book about the river I was raised on, the grief I learned to metabolize again and again. It’s about the loss of climate and life and friendship and the hope for return. Real hope, one that knows all about hopelessness. What the trees can teach us about renewal and resilience. Everything that stands in the way of love and how hard it is to be brave enough to let love in. Yes, it’s a bit of a lover girl book only in that there is a belief that connection is truly all that can save us whether in this life or the next. It’s a book I started as a teeny tiny short story in my first creative writing workshop at the University of Michigan in which Professor Tish O’Dowd left me a note that said, “hm, I think you might have something here,” and then I buried the story for years until I got to graduate school.

Often in college I would write in my boyfriend’s car in the parking lot of his band rehearsals when sitting on the couch of the studio they recorded in got too loud for me to hear myself. I realized I was writing again about those characters when I was living alone in Philadelphia, single for the first time in 5 years, and then over the next decade or so that book bloomed into hundreds of pages, ones that were estranged from me at times as we both went in and out of incubation, then, during a long, hard summer, somehow burst into clarity and stood there, stripped down, suddenly looking more and more like ourselves.

Lenker, again:

Vacancies, none
The same ideas from everyone
We never plan ahead
We take the gamble on instead
And if they turn us down
Find a warm bed in the next town
If they turn us down

It’s a book that let me see who I’d become. What I desired, which, it turns out, is so, so much. More than I thought I was allowed to want. To let that be okay, and more than that, possible. Worth all the labor and longing and drowning out of the naysayers. To see that at times I’d been the biggest one. The sticky nights alone in a tiny apartment. Saying no to friends and lovers and islanding myself. The scramble of shitty underpaid freelance jobs to avoid selling away my days. Being balled on the floor in tears. Dropping chapter after chapter and rewriting every word. Speaking each word aloud alone in my bedroom and only keeping what I could feel in my own heart. The false hope, the nights reading to half-empty rooms, of wondering if anyone could hear me. It’s a book I hope will hold readers in their pain and unknowns and make them stand in some strange meadow alone and listen to the voices that find them there. To trust them. To trust their own song—that language can be made of longing and that whatever feels unbearable in their lives or imagination is far, far from that.

We can bear it all, friends, truly we can.

Wake up. Take that drive.

Do it all again.

j