by Harrison Knight (@_harrysawn_)
On the hottest and sunniest days, Florida’s air ekes past 100 degrees Fahrenheit and its asphalt, composed of shattered stone and bitumen, can reach beyond 150. The road’s dark color soaks up the Sunshine State’s heat, and the ground shimmers and burns. The rubber of Florida’s tires, even when laden with synthetic materials, are sensitive to heat. They soften and become more pliable, their treads wear down more easily. The hot air expands the air in the tires, and pressure increases. In the best case scenario, you replace the tires sooner than you’d like to. In the worst, you blow one up doing seventy-five and sweat it out on the side of the highway.
So it is no exaggeration when Zane Mclaughlin of Oldstar, a band from Panama City Beach in Florida’s panhandle, sings, “Let’s pray for my tires / So they don’t spread like wings.” Florida tires need prayers, especially when they have to live through all the driving that happens on Oldstar’s latest project, Of the Highway, a focused, heartfelt country rock record about, mostly, the highway. Oldstar’s first few projects, while showing hints of this album’s country inflections, drew more on a kind of post-Alex G bedroom-slowcore that continues to pervade alternative music—not an uncommon breeding ground for a contemporary alt-country band. But rather than translating that genre’s songwriting norms into the sonic language of major chords, pedal steel, harmonica, and the like, Oldstar’s Of the Highway is a studied approach to refashioning country music, aware of the genre’s dominant imagery. Take “Chrome Drumset”, an album standout anchored by a whining pedal steel and the record’s fullest lyrical narrative. Take, too, “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” by David Allan Coe, written by Steve Goodman and John Prine, in which it’s stated that “the perfect country and western song” must include mama, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk. In “Chrome Drumset”, we have “my daddy’s car”; “in the back of my pickup”; “got my first ticket”; and “a barstool with my name on it.” No trains, but I chalk that up to a generational divide.
Many of the songs on Of the Highway just about hold up to Steve Goodman’s test. Fortunately, though, Oldstar’s guitars have not abandoned their pedal boards. The album’s earworm, which I’m inclined to call its best song, is “Nail.” It’s the shortest and the heaviest track, a washed-out two minutes built around a straightforward, emphatic guitar riff. “Nail” has no real sonic tie to country music, drawing much more on nineties indie rockers like Dinosaur Jr. or contemporary shoegazers like Hotline TNT. Its hook, however, is a textbook country metaphor: “Am I the nail that / Caused your flat.” Momentarily stripped of country’s musical signifiers, such lyrical tricks are given new life. It’s the kind of simple, evocative confluence of imagery and heartbreak that defines the best country songwriting.
The highway, luckily for Mclaughlin, is rich enough with material to make up a whole album of similar country metaphors. On “Alabama”, a fuzzy, reaching song that bleeds directly into “Nail”, some well-placed enjambment and a lucky homophone make for mystery: a line that sounds like “I broke down in Utah” turns into “I broke down in Eutaw... Alabama”—a couple hundred miles from Panama City Beach instead of a couple thousand. Later in the song, when Mclaughlin sings “I’ve got the 24/7 blues,” it feels like they’re reading a billboard for a local FM station and finding themselves in its homophones.
The album’s closing track, “Christmas,” is its most stripped back, and it brings the project to rest. “Grass grown up round that For Sale sign / I don’t think anyone’ll buy that house of mine.” As on “Alabama”, the album in general is suffused with the tension of wanting to escape—from Florida, the South, even the outlines of a country music song—and the inability to do so. The car breaks down, it runs out of gas, it isn’t made for the driving you ask of it. Oldstar, having moved from Panama City Beach to Ridgewood, looks back on “Christmas” to realize what all that driving was for, and where it was from: “I think we’ll miss it baby / All of its charm.” I think so. Panama City Beach, all the way at the top of the state, is in the “southern” part of Florida, where country music is unavoidable and pick-up trucks rule the miles and miles of tarmac. Of the Highway, for all its attempts at getting out, knows where it came from.