"Settled Accounts" is acoustic & very Portland

🍩🚲🥑 Track #6 from LOBES REDUCED

Yesterday was another drive day for Keith C and me, and somehow this one hurt more than the Kansas City-to-Denver Trek. It wasn’t that much longer a drive, though, so perhaps our pain was due to the overall lower quality of the podcasts we consumed (The Big Picture was doing a Hall of Fame for Ridley Scott who, Alien notwithstanding, is among the most vanilla big-name-directors in Hollywood).

“What are these idiots [who are hosting this podcast] talking about?!”

Honestly, I can’t really think of what-all happened between 11am and 8pm. There were a couple of moments of scenic interest, but for the most part it was pretty flat, pretty brown, pretty bland. We stopped for a late lunch in Boise, Idaho, a lovely town with significant western charm. The day was glorious and the city was adorable enough to prompt Keith and me to fall into one of our not-infrequent tour chats about how comfortable and pleasant our lives would be if we could only bring ourselves to leave NYC. The phrase “I could live here” has been uttered endlessly by touring wretches who, having lived in vans and Holiday Inns and venue green rooms for weeks at a stretch, will positively buckle at the sight of a suburban Crafstman bungalow. It really doesn’t matter where it is; if there’s a house with a lawn and a cute brunch spot, I’ll immediately begin exploring the local real estate options. My Trulia search history for this tour alone reveals surveys of Columbus, OH, Lawrence, KS, and Denver, CO (for some reason, the only cached search in my Zillow account is for Tuxedo, NY, a town whose name I don’t recognize, which may mean that God wants me to search for housing there?). Anyway, I rotely intoned to Carne that I could live there, and it wasn’t until after we’d finished our meal and returned to the van that I realized I’d been thinking that we were in Des Moines, Iowa, the whole time. Tour makes a pudding of the mind.

So then we drove for another interminable while and it was just all kind of the same crap, except for one stretch of Oregon that had the thickest fog Carne claims he has ever driven through. Because my tour brain was leaking from my ears, I lamely contributed that it was some “pea soup” action, to which Carne responded with confusion. He had never heard the term “thick as pea soup” before, which astounded me. Here I was, thinking that I was dropping the most threadbare of clichés upon my conversation partner, while in reality I was delivering revelatory new similes. He was dazzled by my masterful wordplay. I’ve always been his favorite lyricist, I’m sure, but this was a new level of poetic virtuosity. He’s very lucky. 

You can almost taste that soup!

Is the “pea soup” thing a generational issue? Did it die off after the famously aloof Gen X starting acting too cool to be impressed by thick fog? Is it just one of those weird things determined by the year of your birth, like knowing that Kevin Costner was the greatest male movie star of the 1980s? I guess we’ll never know, because I can’t be bothered to think about it anymore.

Anyway, we stopped in Boardman (or Broadman? I’m sitting in the town as we speak, and I don’t know the answer), Oregon, for drinks and a light dinner with Sean McVerry and bass-man Zeno, and had a great time in one of those small-town bar-n-grilles that always seem ominous on the outside due to the volume of amassed loose gravel and pickup trucks in the parking lot but then are just full of warm and inviting people who refuse to indulge our egotistical belief that they’re going to flip out over this incredible pack of New Yorkers who’ve just rolled into their establishment like a bunch of bejeweled Habsburg princes. To be fair, our waitress did tell us that she knew we were from out of town because “the only people who don’t know what ‘fry sauce’ is are from the east coast or Canada.” Also, we had to ask what “jojos” were, which was embarrassing until we realized that the nomenclature was just a bit of pageantry to trick us into buying potato wedges, the worst form of fried potato. Sean got tater tots and Zeno got beer-batter fries, and I was the dumbass sitting there with jojos, the laughingstock of Broadman or Boardman.

Then we saw Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, which was kind of just our video for Dumb Luck stretched out to 105 minutes, minus the good music. Which is to say: I highly recommend it.

Now it’s off to Portland, Oregon, a town that prompts a Zillow search every time I even think about it. A great town full of very cool, thoughtful people. Perhaps (SEGUE) that’s why our song “Settled Accounts” is so well suited, as Portland’s Acoustic Song of the Day. A friend I’ve consulted assures me that: “Settled Accounts’ reflective nature and themes of introspection could be paired with Portland's introspective and indie culture, which is also known for its environmental consciousness and activism.”  

No wonder I want to live here!

Hey, guys — Chris here, popping in for a sec at the end of Keith’s excellent piece. I though a nice portrait of Keith “living in Portland” would a great finishing touch, but I’m no artist, so I told the AI to draw “Keith Murray of We Are Scientists living in Portland,” and wow! This seems dead on! It is reasonable, for example, to assume that Keith would wear his band’s shirt a lot when first finding his bearings in a new city, since he’d worry that people wouldn’t recognize him out of context. I’m not sure what he has in his right hand, I think it’s either a vape or a pistol, but both of those feel accurate. It is also true that Keith will be unused to how much it rains in Portland, so the sky will seem, at least to him, like water, as seen here. Now if Trulia would just do its part!