Elseworthy

It was July 2015 and I was leaving on a trip that was supposed to roughly follow the Lewis and Clarke route from St. Louis all the way to the west coast. A year earlier I had taken my first solo road trip to the Grand Canyon. It had inspired and change me in ways I had not yet understood but I knew I needed another one. This one was going to be two weeks instead of one and I had no idea how lucky I was to have that kind of time off work or the social freedom to leave for that long. I had never been to most of the states I was heading toward, only having read about them in books or seen them in movies. It felt like it was going to be the biggest adventures I was ever going to go on.

I slept in the car, and lived on cheap food and coffee. I only took the Yamaha Portasound I had found at my girlfriend’s aunt’s estate sale after she died. From day one, I started writing songs on this trip. I had no idea what these songs would mean to me or the memories they would conjure one day as I played them.

When I official started Dream Jurnal with Rachelle, we played these songs, Ugly Home, Undesireable Life, Desert Hymn plus the ones wrote afterward like Postcard, Noccalula Falls, Long Forgotten Things. These were the first songs I ever sang with someone else on stage with me. They persisted.

Then, a lot of life happened.

In 2022, I spent spring break at my Mom’s house, a small trailer on a beautiful hill in a holler in Manchester, KY. I carried every instrument I had including a guitar, bass, banjo, accordian, trumpet, trombone, harmonica, flute, and a couple of shakers. That week I put down most of these songs. I had a plan to make an album about the road trips I took, the journeys that changed my life, and the profound spiritual revelations I had along the way.

Then…nothing happened. For three years they sat on a hard drive on my studio desk as I moved to a new school in a new town, and had to focus my attention on making sure my job was done. At the new school, I met Matt who talked me into going disc golfing with him and his friends Justin and Randy.

We talked a lot about music in between my horrible throws, and it came up that Randy was building a recording studio in his garage. Fast forward two years to summer of 2024 when I ran into Randy and his wife Morgan in Walmart and we made a concrete plan for me to come over and record a song.

The song we recorded was Pollyanna which you can find anywhere. We were proud of the work we had done, so I sent him all the tracks sitting on my hard drive. Randy went to work and redid a bunch of drums, bass line, and then we started ticking off things on the list of stuff to record. Eventually we were done and Randy had made it all sound so good.

I asked my friend Marilyn to paint the album cover based off of a picture I had taken in Death Valley on that trip. She readily agreed and soon we had everything we needed to put this album out.

This was an album ten plus years in the making and I had no idea. I’m still realizing how those trips took me so far away from here and who I was for me to return utterly changed with whole new songs to write.

I feel those years in my soul and body. I’m not 26 anymore. Part of me wants to be sad, nostalgic, and bitter about it. Year pass, life is short. But recently I’ve been thinking about how all those great trips were once far into the future, dreams a small boy who wanted to see the world.

Time is a thief. Time is a giver of great gifts.

I hope you enjoy this gift.

Credit: Songs and music: Erik Simpson; Musical collaborators: Rachelle Barr, Randy Cantrell, Morgan Cantrell, Justin Spears; Recording: Erik Simpson and Randy Cantrell @ OvaTone Records and Erik’s Mom’s house; Mixing: Randy Cantrell @ OvaTone Records; Mastering: Jason NeSmith @ Chase Park Transduction; Album art: MVSpence.