Day 14: Dacono (with Sadye Rose)

Lyrics:
The wind blows west
East of I-25
Like the cowboy said
The other night at the dive

Driving 'round
With a broken radio
Rundown
Lost in Dacono

Fracking Earth
And fucking minds
Flatland weeds
And tumbled time

Stalled out
Down where the grass glows
The ravaged bones
Here in Dacono

Fix the radiator
Hit the store
Walk through the mirror

The corndog girl
In the freezer bin
When lips turn blue
It's Bloody Mary again 

Say it three times
Through the open window
Flip the bird
Farewell, Dacono

Details: Every January, I like to write a song with a novice (or close to novice) songwriter. Sadye Rose is one of the most creative people I know, but she's never stuck to one thing long enough to be defined by any particular art. I know I like her prose style, and I really like her taste in music, so I wanted to see what we'd come up with.

When she showed up, she had vocabulary cards, so we started flipping through them, looking for inspiration. Somehow we got into a conversation about some of the small towns that are along I-25. There's fracking, of course, and allegedly the wind changes directions once you cross I-25 going East. But Sadye had a story about a little girl who was claiming to be a corndog in a grocery store in Dacono; to her mom's consternation, the girl climbed into a refrigerated bin and told anyone who looked that she was a corndog. Anyway, we wanted to fit that into the song, even though we didn't want to write a funny song.

It took about 3.5 hours to write the song. The recording took about 30 minutes to do, if you include practice. I rushed it a little bit because I didn't want my roommate feeling displaced for too long, so it's not a super polished performance. But it was such a fun time!