Our Story 

Lake Martin, Alabama

July 4, 2020

Dawn breaks early at the lake – and quickly. Mist scurrying across the water trying to find a fissure there - to dive deep - before being zapped by the sun and vaporizing into the ubiquitous humidity. But I’m up early with the dogs – it’s been a month since their last visit, and they want an early start. The Lake House is truly a dog’s heaven – they’ll sleep in another hour tomorrow and more the day after that, but the first morning – they are ready to go at dawn.

I grew up in Auburn – not too far away, but I did not grow up with access to the lake. My parents bought this property about a year after I was off the payroll – chasing rock-n-roll dreams in Atlanta in the early 90’s.

In 2018, I found myself back in the dating pool. When I mentioned my love for the Beastie Boys and Neko Case on my otherwise lame dating profile, it caught Diane's attention. She – strikingly gorgeous – had a pic of her w/ Auburn’s world-renowned (and most awarded) mascot, Aubie. A match made in heaven.

Diane is deep and wide and steeped in all the best music – like a walking encyclopedia sifting through song after song and genre after genre to bubble up the best of the best.

Every time I think I know a song that she might not really know, I’d try to look cool – saying something like; “so – this is my favorite Love & Rockets song, ‘No New Tale to Tell’ – you know those guys were in Bauhaus, too?” and Diane would answer with something like, “oh – yeah – I saw them in ’86 at The Warehouse in Leeds – I was 15, but over there on holiday... We hung out afterwards, Daniel was pretty cool – we’re still friends on Facebook, but David always freaked me out a little bit. They say they wrote a song about me in ’89, but I’m not sure – those two are just crazy”...

So nonchalant it has to be true, right?

I don’t sing. I can barely talk in tune – this is to my dying shame.

Diane sings! Woohoo – another match.

Diane’s mom passed away right before Covid hit – March of 2020 – and – you know when a big event like that happens, people say, “well the world keeps on going.” Not for us – the world stopped; “two weeks to flatten the curve” then hard shutdowns throughout the world. Our planned trip to Europe for a work conference was canceled and we were all struggling with the new reality.

Lemons and Lemonade, we focused on the key role music played in getting us together a couple of years earlier and so we pivoted...

Diane’s best friend lives in Shreveport and has muscular dystrophy – has her whole life. She’s vent dependent and her husband tirelessly dispenses care along with a team of nurses 24x7 in their home-as-an-ICU. Diane has been going twice a year for 20 years – and these are “working” trips for the most part – to give her husband a break.

True Love.

Pivot – so – our pivot was – let’s go to Shreveport – jump off from the lake, maybe take a southerly route on the way there and a more northerly route on the way back. Then it occurred to me – Let’s build a mobile recording studio (quickly renamed the MRS!)!

What if we recorded songs along the way – songs that belonged to places? What if we recorded in bathrooms, motels, parking lots and strip malls? What would happen?

I think covering a song is similar to cooking a foreign cuisine – you learn so much about the origin by doing. Learning and then playing – especially in front of people – a song that you love enhances your love it. Learning the breaks, the speed, the crowd reaction to certain parts; letting a chorus get loud only to let a verse get quiet – standing on the shoulders of giants indeed.

Singing songs about the southland – well, I guess that’s as good as a place to start!

Well, we didn’t start in Athens so that deep taproot of the greatest band of all time, REM, was off limits (surely, they played in all these towns we were headed to – one of my favorite lyrics of their road trip song, “Another Greenville, another Magic Mart, Jeffer grab your fiddle” comes to mind), so we started mapping out the trip and circling around what made sense.

I grew up in the early years of hip-hop – Sugarhill Gang to Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel, but quickly engulfed in LL Cool Jay, Run DMC, Whodini and the Beastie Boys.

1987 high school graduation, a CD player as a birthday present and 10 CDs for a penny at Columbia House brought a whole new world of music.

REM, The Cure, The Smiths – eventually purchasing CDs based on Spin and Rolling Stone reviews (that’s how you had to do it in the ol’ days, kids – based on an album cover and a review – no pre-listening unless you could convince your local record shop cooler-than-thou clerk to break the seal of something for a listen)…

One of those was The Trinity Sessions by The Cowboy Junkies who have stayed with me all these years as one of my favorite bands. I’ve seen them many times – met Margo a few times and I just love them.

One of their songs, 200 More Miles opens with the line, “Atlanta’s a distant memory, Montgomery a recent blur.”

I grew up and was living at the time in Auburn, Alabama which is on I-85 – the stretch between Atlanta and Montgomery. A road I have traveled countless times – up to Atlanta for the airport, down to Montgomery for shopping, restaurants, and the capital.

I researched (as you really only could do back then) what I could by reading about the Timmons and learned they are firmly Canadian and I just couldn’t wrap my head around how this songwriter from Canada was able to capture what it’s like driving through the south – it’s the ultimate road trip song and places the singer squarely in the state of Alabama 20 miles from Lake Martin. So – we started with the couplet and took the liberty to change Tulsa to Shreveport as our intended destination.

In September 1952, just three months before his death and coming off a bender (w/ a potential night in jail that was probably covered up) in nearby Alex City, Hank Williams retired to a friend’s fishing camp on Lake Martin and wrote a song about a wooden Indian named Kaw-Liga. This song is a slice of America – a universal tale about every boy that’s ever liked a girl, but couldn’t get the courage up to ask her out.

We brought out the MRS for its maiden voyage on the dock of my parent’s lake house – this was not a wise move as there a million parts to the MRS and no redundancy – so – even one connector in the water would have killed the project before it got any steam...

But – we were careful, and we survived. If you listen closely to the vocal track, you can hear the boats clanging against the floating dock when a wake hit the shore.

We recorded a second set of tracks at the Kowliga restaurant on the other side of the lake – right next to the very cabin Hank stayed in almost 70 years earlier. A little spooky – but exactly the vibe we’re heading for.