The Other Side
Song Feature and Long Sleeve Masterpiece by CQ&LOLO
Today’s song feature comes with a special surprise: the coolest long sleeve tee I’ve ever laid eyes on.
Loren Purcell and Crystal Quinn, known collectively as CQ&LOLO are a design team based in Minneapolis whose work both together and individually I have long admired. Traditionally I design my own shirts, but feeling overwhelmed with the demands of releasing music and touring independently and also wanting my merch to level up for this album cycle, I reached out to CQ&LOLO about designing some pieces for Death Valley.
I gave them an early version of the album along with some vague directives and they returned with the Death Valley “OTHER” tee, the Butch Bastard Death Valley hat, and the piece I’ve been perhaps most excited about, “The Other Side” long sleeve tee.
One of the directives I offered was that I wanted it to be more than just “band merch”. I didn’t want it to be an advertisement for my project, but rather an actual clothing line inspired by the music of Death Valley. They nailed it on all fronts, especially with this piece, available now in Ecru and Desert Sand.
The song they mused on the most for this clothing line is the opening track from Death Valley, “The Other Side”.
This is the first song I wrote for the album. It was early pandemic, businesses were shut down, people were told to remain inside their homes, we were wiping down our groceries with sanitizer, singing happy birthday twice in succession as we washed our hands, engaging in tedious zoom calls, talking about “flattening the curve”, cursing Rudy Gobert, watching Tiger King, dusting off our unfinished sci-fi and rom-com screenplays, buying exercise equipment and acoustic guitars, wearing holes in our sweatpants, and for some of us, completely losing our equilibriums and being rapidly brainwashed by YouTube.
At the time, I was out of sync with the rhythms of song craft. A friend reached out and asked me to contribute to a compilation of “Covid” songs a label was putting together. I took that as a prompt. What came out was “The Other Side”. I liked it, and rather than offer it to the compilation, I kept it as the jump off point for the collection of songs that became Death Valley.
As I wrote and developed this song, the image I had running through my head was a lone car at night passing through an abandoned Clovis, New Mexico. By the end of the song the car reaches warp speed and vanishes.
Richard Gowen played drums and Dave Cerminara mixed. Everything else is my fault.
Here’s a video of me performing it at Royal Albert Hall:
Every old town I roll through
Honey, you know who you’re talking to
The storefronts are frozen
where you won’t find the chosen or the few
You might find it hard to look past
the bullets or the plexiglass
The vision won’t scatter
lest the self portrait shatter behind the mask
Tell St. Cecila I’m enslaved to her cooking
I’ve been driving all night to get through
to the other side of you
No signs of the living but you might
wind up T-boned at the yellow light
With fuel you have left for bad dreams
and dark waters on the right
No time to pull over and park
for the Sherbet or the Cutty Sark
The high beams will only make lonely
what’s lurking in the dark