Slowly Straight To You
New Tune Out Now: Listen With Your Ears
Everything seems to be crumbling — slowly, then all of a sudden.
Welcome to 2025; this is the vibe.
I find myself fighting between apathy and the desperate attempt to not get myself sucked into it.
But I get sucked in. I get outraged. Try as I might.
But I do do1 it less than last time.
Amidst the chaos and the catastrophe, there are, I swear to god, beautiful things coming quietly to life. I’ve seen friends who lost everything in the fires still take time for a hike or a concert or some other simple moment of joy or laughter. I played a show with the other night with a musician who’d lost her home — after having lost her last home in Colorado in a fire just 3 years ago.
She was hanging in there, joking about living at the Holiday Inn in Ventura. If she can do it, so can we.
I do not like to be all mister brightside2. I’m simply trying to figure it out for myself: What do we do with a clear blue sky while the fire rages, not imperceptibly, just out of sight?
I wrote “Slowly Straight To You” in 2020. It showed up one jetlagged night in London, where I’d just smuggled myself in3 amidst Pandemic-era travel restrictions. I’d met Claire at the end of 2019, fell in love, then spent 4 months quarantined apart from her. When we finally met back up, after several false starts, and the partner I’d been waiting my whole life to find had finally (inextricably it seems) entered my life, the world was roiled by racial uprising, spiraling loss of life, disastrous wildfires, and a government wholly disinterested in anything other than supplementing itself.
And they say history has a tendency to repeat.
What I can say, now looking back on this song and those years that it spawned, is that my time spent watching the other shoe dangle were of no particularly good use. I craned my neck staring upward at it, obsessed with when it was going to drop, certain that the good things right in front of me were either somehow going to fall apart or sparsely earned.
I just can't believe it's really happening My whole life has told me that it's too good to be true So I keep on waiting for another tragedy Til I realize my tragedies have only led me slowly straight to you
It’s a journey of a song, recorded in what I tend to think of as four distinct movements, the production varying greatly from a synthed out first verse to a live, stripped down final one.4
Give it a spin, save it to a playlist, hit that little heart or plus button — but, more than anything, just let me know what it made you think or how it made you feel. Connecting through music is one of the best ways we have to stay together.
I wish you the privilege of being able to remember that some good, I swear to god, will come again soon.
-David
I just said doodoo
IMCOMINGOUTOFMYCAGEANDIVEBEENDOINGJUSTFINE!
Forgive me if I’ve told this story before, but it’s one of my favorites: When I touched down in London on June 26th, 2020, the rules of who could enter were very opaque. I was not allowed in the EU, but due to that wonderful little Brexit thing, it was very unclear as to what the UK’s position officially was. Of course British Airways would sell you a ticket in any case, so I showed up in London with my green eyes and my US Passport and all the attendant “they’ll just let me in everywhere” sort of attitude that tends to come with ‘em. And since it had been an 11-hour overnight flight from LA, I was wearing sweatpants and a hoodie and the nearly indistinguishable face of someone who’d just slept on a plane heavily aided by xanax and a little bit of red wine. Not only that, I hadn’t had a proper haircut in months (PandemicLyfe), had a guitar slung over my shoulder, and a one-way ticket booked without a return. For the first time in my life, I was actually questioned, intensely, when attempting to enter into a different country. After running through my semi-real story of a business meeting with my now-wife’s investor, an english businessman who had written us a note, I told her that I was there to meet up with my then-girlfriend, who was french, and then head into France with her after the quarantine period. She bought this story more, but kept questioning me briskly, getting me to tell my details over and over again until she eventually asked me, “Do you have any money?” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with this, so I muttered, “uhh I have like $200 American dollars in my backpack?” To which she said, “no, do you have actual money?” At which point I went, “umm I can show you my bank account?” I don’t remember it being the most particularly impressive number, but, evidently, my savings contained at least a respectable enough sum because when I pulled up my banking app and showed her the home screen, she went, “okay, you can go in.” That’s all it took.
At around the 3-minute mark we get one of my favorite parts of this whole record, where suddenly this very digital/in-the-box style of production gives way to lush organic instruments, vintage drums and acoustic guitars. We recorded that part live, my producer Justin and I, just futzing around together, he, at first delicately, and then boisterously smashing some drums while I strummed a very 8th-grade power chord kind of guitar part. We had some feelings to let out.