Halfway Back

Musical time travel and randomly channeled visits to obscure desert towns.

“It’s like that song you wrote—‘Halfway to Eloy,” my brother in law Brooks said, telling me and Becky about his work commute on a recent call from my sister Olivia.

For a while now, I’ve been circling around on the idea music of music as a method of “time traveling” through our own consciousness. The musician Joshua Wayne Hensley of The Rutabega recently tweeted something that clarified what I’ve been trying to say about the idea, posting about how music can take “us back to specific moments,” pull “us into focus in the present,” and how it could potentially carry “us forward in ways we may not fully understand.”

I retweeted his post and it stuck with me. Yesterday, I received an email from Joshua sharing how he’d noticed the theme recurring often enough on the podcast I host for Aquarium Drunkard, Transmissions, citing my talks with Jim Jarmusch and Cate Le Bon in particular: “I kinda gasped when I saw that you had retweeted my post about music being a time machine of sorts…I was listening to the Cate interview while I was prepping mushrooms for dinner just now and you just said ‘music allows for that slippery sense of time’ and Cate talked about music creating memories of the future.”

Have you ever had an experience like Joshua is talking about? One where the sound of a song propels you into re-inhabiting a past self? Or where the melody hits you square between the eyes and you realize, acutely, how terrific existence is in that very moment? It’s happened to me as a listener countless times, and as I’ve got more into playing music myself, I find it happening with almost alarming frequency.

I opened this note with a recent conversation with my brother in law Brooks, who was describing his route to work, which takes him “Halfway to Eloy” from his place. “Eloy” was an instrumental sketch when I brought it to my friends Zane Gillum (bass), Zach Toporek (drums, bass, guitar, keys). I didn’t have any lyrics when I arrived to Zach’s studio that day with my drum machine, but it was easy enough to just get with my friends and bliss out, documenting our improv as we went. After we had a basic structure in place, Zach got to cleaning up the multi-tracks. I grabbed a notebook, closed my eyes, and began imagining scenes as it played back.

Slipping into my head, I found myself decades in the past on a rural Arizona road, driving the green Mercury Tracer I bought from my mom—the one with annoying automatic seatbelts—the stereo blaring. I didn’t think about driving those backroads—I was there, driving them. And then the past began collaging with other scenes in my head—an image from a favorite LP gatefold, some science fictionalized medical recollections, and frankly, some nonsense. Where was this song taking place, I asked myself. Without any extra thought, I jotted down the phrase “Halfway from Eloy.” Later, Zach and I cooked up that boogieing back half, and the song was ready to be handed off to producer Michael Krassner, who added his beautiful piano and organ parts.

I sing “halfway from” in the song itself, but when it came time to give it a title, “halfway to” felt better. It blurs and complicates the timeline in a way I appreciate. It makes more space for the listener to wander in. It’s not about a road I used to drive down, it’s about the one Brooks is on right now. Or, if we’re lucky, the one you’ll drive tomorrow, your radio playing as the signal turns to static and becomes something else.

Everything at one time…

In my last missive I mentioned I’d be writing about a Lenny Kaye sample on the record and how it came to be included. But I don’t have my shit together enough for that entry just yet. Apologies. It’ll arrive soon enough—and touch on some of the same themes as this entry. In the meantime, why don’t you check out this great No Dogs From Space episode on his essential garage rock, punk-midwifing compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968? And while you’re at it, read the genius piece Elizabeth Nelson wrote about him for the Southwest Review, The Ecology of a Scene.