The music of Moon Taxi makes you want to roll your own cigarettes, even if you aren't a smoker. They make you want to pull that sheath filled with sweet, shredded tobacco leaf out, lie down a paper and roll a tight one, licking down the gummed edge to finish the job and get to the inhaling and exhaling that you've been craving and have thus worked for. It's a feeling of needing to just lean back in a chair, to be outdoors, with feet propped up on a wall, the front legs of the chair tipped backward and just sitting there and letting everything just settle on you.
It's about getting caught up in the unwinding that you so desperately need. It's looking out a lawn that's kempt, but not too kempt. It's fairly weed-free and it's your lawn. You've got no one to blame but yourself when it goes to seed or gets bare in places. You look out, over the grass and the dust and the dirt, out at the old corncrib and you think about all the pets you had around the farm all those years. You always buried them, but marked none of the gravesites. You think about them very little, other than odd occasions. They remind you of nothing that's happening anymore.
The Nashville, Tennessee, band chronicles a form of easy living that feels like it's still awfully strained. It's a life that can get you to that chair and that hand-rolled cigarette, but it's never going to clear the clouds out of your head enough to just enjoy the view. It sounds as if these are people who are in need of a break or some guidance, whatever would help most. They're the sorts of people who look out a window and pray for rain, even if they don't have crops in the ground. It's gonna help someone and they hope for the trickle down effect to hit them too. They're good with the rain, they're good with the uncertainty and they're good with the elongated journey that it takes to get from sowing to reaping.