New Song: Mixtape and Woodgrain
A changed Cracker Barrel logo sent me down a rabbit hole of vanished things — and I never got out of bed before the song was written.
Added a new song: Mixtape and Woodgrain.
This one started with a logo. Cracker Barrel announced it was dropping Uncle Herschel and cleaning up its branding, and it hit a nerve I didn’t know was exposed. Not because the logo matters — because it had been sitting in the background of my whole life, and now even that was moving.
I lay in bed that morning and just started collecting things. Craftsman wrenches on the back wall at Sears. The telephone cord stretched across the kitchen. Streamers on a Western Flyer’s handlebars. None of it was ever supposed to be important. It became important because it was ours.
Underneath the objects, of course, are the people. Dad’s boots on the floor. Mom coming through the door. The song knows that’s what it’s really about.
It leans hard into campy nostalgia on purpose — brand names, old cereal boxes, wood grain. Memory doesn’t file things neatly. It keeps fragments, and sometimes the fragments are all that’s left.
Suno rendered it as 70’s outlaw country, which turned out to be exactly the right room for it.