Some days feel like we're on a fixed schedule, again. It just feels like we've gotten nowhere we want to be. We're stuck heavy and rusting into the little holes that we've dug for ourselves. We look down and our legs look like the posts that prop up the mailboxes on rural routes. It's in thinking about these posts and these mailboxes that we start to think that our mouths are like their mouths, there to be manually dropped open and stuffed with whatever anyone wants to feed us. Then they just flip the opening of the mouth back shut and leave us there to chew on it and either swallow or spit it out into the ditch. Some days it feels as if nothing much is going to change from the way that we've carved out our little existence and we're all aware that these existences are little, but we like to attempt to alter them. We like to think that we can shake things up, but we're disappointed more times than not. We wind up here again, where we most expected to wind up.
The music of the Long Beach, California-based group The Red River winds us into a bent dimension, a place where lead singer Bill Roberts has seemed to found the elixir or a method for getting to walk the halls of some sort of a hippie Valhalla. There is merriment there and there is a feeling of justness and of an understanding of what it took to arrive at such a place, where the drinks are dancing and there is much back-slapping and bird-watching. There are streams and river gurgling and the colors are bold and beautiful. There's a utopian sort of feel to many of the songs that are on the group's wonderful debut album, "Little Songs About The Big Picture." We're aware that most of these projections are wishful thinking and that there's no way to get to them anytime soon, but it sounds so good to hear about them now that we're willing to suspend that piece of the finer print.
"When We Are Wild," is a song about doing something similar to what Ron Paul and the boys from William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" would have us do if it were up to them, though this story would have more of a happy ending, or at least more dogs and free red wine. It would be a free-for-all of no rent payments, all the food you could eat and all kinds of lazy days in the shade or the sun and DEFINITELY hammocks, along with ice cream cones and slow and long kisses from the one person we're most attracted to. It's a place where "we won't get hungry, or tired or bored." Sounds pretty damned good to us. Where do we sign so we can get the fuck out of HERE immediately? We're ready to repeat after Roberts right now, "I am holy, I am strong, I am bound." And we are better than this. We would like these sun kisses, pronto, buddy.