Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash
For Mark Stuart and the Bastard Sons, the last ten years has been a blur of miles and markers. BSOJC has played more shows most years than most bands do in their entire careers, and theyve done it the hard way, piling their own gear into their own van, and then heading off into a dark night thats just a couple of hours away from day. A lot of indie bands have done a lot of this, but not many have made the long haul across an entire decade. And amidst that grueling schedule, Stewart has managed to keep writing, delivering two previous records, Walk Alone and Distance Between, that built a hardcore fanbase for the band and yet achieved a critical recognition that most singer-songwriters would slit their left wrist to gain. It was an enviable position, as long as you didnt have to do all the work that went with it. As a songwriter, Stuart is doing something very different than writing the songs that make country music whatever it is today. These are landscapes, portraits, silhouettes. This is just me trying to be a picture painter with words. Finding a way to turn a phrase in a song that is meaningful and unpredictable. My dad wanted to be a writer. He didnt get to be a writer but he had a bunch of books in the house. I still dont watch television. I read books.exclusively. Stuart heard about his dads death before a show in Madison, Wisconsin. A year later, just about to the day, just before a show in Madison, Wisconsiin, he heard about Johnny Cashs death. Just one of those things, maybe. Mile Markers is pretty much what the name says: a set of signs posted to guide the way home, or maybe point out the direction that has home in the rear view mirror. Set in the West, it rambles and wanders and aims the steering wheel out at the endless horizon. A halfways unfolded road map, it passes through Austin and Tucson and San Ysidro and Los Angeles, through the badlands of both South Dakota and New Mexico, from Oklahoma and the windy Panhandle country around Abilene all the way to Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley. But Mile Markers is a spiritual voyage as much as a mere travelogue, a set of tales that turns into a single song of journeying forth. .................................................................... Its like a Western, in a way. Its The Searchers, or Ride the High Country, or High Plains Drifter. Or evenTwo-Lane Blacktop or The Getaway, because its set in a contemporary West divided by white lines and asphalt, and settled by truckstops and parking lots. Its a landscape of big skies and long roads and endless Mile Markers flying by at the edge of your vision. And like every true Western ever, contemporary or not, its a story of drifting and settling, of setting down roots and then having them torn up again, of learning that you dont dare settle down when youre just going to be forced to hit the road again.
And these are definitely road songs. These are songs that will turn up on ten thousand roadtrip mixes alongside Lost Highway and Lonesome Fugitive, and Six Days On The Road and Anybody Goin To San Antone; seguing into Willin and Waiting For A Train, and 500 Miles From My Home and Amarillo By Morning and Wreck On The Highway and Lodi and Lookin At The World Through A Windshield.
I didnt really start out to write a road cycle. Some of em I had written not that long before I went into the studio and others Id been carrying around with me for a long time. I was driving along the 99, sleeping in the back seat, and when I woke up, I had 'The Road To Bakersfield.' It was on one trip to the Sequoia Mountains: 'California Sky,' 'Radio Girl' and 'The Road To Bakersfield' -- I wrote those in three day period. And later, another dream, a dream in which the sequence of the songs of Mile Markers came to him in order, all laid out the way they wanted to be.What Mile Markers is, what Mark Stuarts Bastard Sons are, above and beyond it all, is nothing like an imitation. There are rockabilly rebels and Alt-Country bands and New Outlaw Country stylists and far too many An Amazing Tribute To... acts, but what Mark Stuart has managed to do, over and over and now once again on Mile Markers, is come up with something that manages to be fresh and deep-rooted both, to be old-fashioned and brand new at the same time. There are bands out there that dress more authentically than the Bastard Sons, bands that have more (or less) tattoos or use vintage amps and guitars that pointedly predate Leo Fender and Semie Mosrite and Paul Bigsby. Maybe thats their version of a time machine that will magically transport them through time to a land they never will really ever manage to live in. Mark Stuart pays his tribute to the giants who have gone before by writing the finest, fiercest songs he can about the moment were all stuck with. Thats the present and the past, with the future looming up just ahead on the horizon, just down the road.