In the middle of the Richard The Lionhearted song, "High Noon," there's a line about a summer sun scorching the land. It's a drought. The drought's on. The cattle herd is looking gaunt. The creek beds are dry and gray. You can jump across all of them, with ease.
The Columbia, Missouri, band creates this scorcher of an environment. They build this place that's going to have to buckle down if it wants to survive. It's this place without air conditioning, where you wake up sticking to your sheets, where there's nothing you can do to possibly keep the houseplants alive. The dog's whimpering and most every heart is fading, trying to conserve and work normally on a resting heart rate, just to make it through, just to survive.
These feel like the hallucinations of a Midwesterner, for sure, for the man who's got hardly anything and who still doesn't have much of a problem with it. Out here, where everything's bone dry, where everyone's hurting, there are so many cheap beers to choose from that it just doesn't matter. You don't have to scratch your eyes out with craziness. You can just keep going. You're going to keep walking the sides of the roads, barely missing getting hit by oncoming traffic that's whooshing by without regard for life.