Thoughts about my song 'Indiana'

Like any good story, my album made around the world will start from home.  Though the song’s called ‘Indiana’, it was made in San Francisco; the girl who inspired it was born in Indiana.  The polaroid I’m using for the cover was taken in my apartment here in the city.  To me, this one’s a love song – all my break-up songs are.

The older you get, the more likely each step you take into a new relationship will be coupled with fear. “Ah, I’ve been here before,” we think, and with the first kiss comes the sound of the rattlesnake, and in the quiet moments when you first lay with them the sting of an old poison can come in and remind you that a darkness you once endured started in a moment similar.

Then comes the vulnerability – we say, here, this is where my skin was once soft and new, and now look at how my burns have healed, and look at these, here, those that haven’t.  You hope they run their fingers across the contours of those wounds, old and new, and you hope in the swirls and shapes our burns have made they’ll see something other than proof you don’t deserve to be loved.

I can see you, they reply.  I’ve run my thumb across the fractures you’re ashamed to show.  And like the needle to a vinyl’s grooves, when I run my thumb across them I can hear your sweet song.  I haven’t fallen for you because your song is perfect; I have fallen for you because in the ways you are imperfect I have found the same shapes of the pieces I have lost, or in what you perceive as your sour notes, my own have fit between them to draw our melody.

Even after all that, though, life can ultimately loosen the knots you tie together.  The closeness you both earned can evaporate.  What you thought was, no longer is.  What you thought could be, couldn’t.  An end comes, and with that, it can feel like – what was all this for?

If you’re quiet enough to hear it – if you let go of the bitterness and you stop looking down the road that wasn’t – you can still hear their melody; it sings in quiet harmony with yours, along with the rest of those who’ve played a part in your composition.  On the canvas that holds your heart you can see what vibrancies they added.  Across your meadow you can see the small mounds of soil that hide the seeds they planted.  And when time draws those seeds to sprout you can see the flowers that would have never bloomed.

In this way, regardless of the outcome, to allow yourself to love is a gift that goes both ways.  I am me, I am the pieces that others were brave enough to give, and I am the notes I’ve been still enough to hear.  I wrote this song because I can hear her notes in my chords, and because of that – the experience deserves to be encased in amber in the only way I know how.

When I wrote this song, I did not hear the sound of the rattlesnake; I felt peace – like what a beautiful thing that was, and how lush a thing this sadness is, and what a gift it is to risk this kind of nakedness.

Kai Straw

About the song ‘Indiana’

Made in San Francisco, 2023

New Orleans

I’m writing this at 1AM in New Orleans.  My first stop as I make an album around the world.

So far – lotta firsts for me.  I tried gumbo.  And jumbalaya.  And a poboy.  Crab cake.  A beignet.  Some big shrimp that I had to de-shell myself.  I had dinner on a steamboat out on the Mississippi.  I saw George Porter, Jr., perform at The Maple Leaf.  I kayaked, first time, and this was out on a Louisiana bayou among the alligators, the cyprus trees and spanish moss.  If you listen right, it’s like you can hear whispers through the trees as the wind rushes through them.  My fingers got so cold the water felt warm.

I walked down Bourbon Street where every bar is overflowing with neon signs and drunk tourists and weed smoke and tarot card readers and jazz and within all that there was a couple doing heroin right there in a doorway.  The woman who served me my first poboy had no teeth, or maybe three.  Almost all servers called me baby.  And it’s pronounced like “New-Orlins” not “New Orleens”.

On Bourbon Street, it’s this 10-block canyon of bars and nightclubs with different songs screaming from each of them – and each song fades in and out of the next as you’re walking – with the predominant constant being the banging of plastic buckets by groups of kids and teenagers at the end of almost every one.  I tipped one of them and the rest swarmed me saying they were owed some money, too.  The smallest one looked mad, maybe nine years old, “Cash up!”  He said.

In my elevator, a woman was bleeding from her knee – it was dripping down her shin to her ankle.  She was standing with her friend.  They were drunk, sweaty, and definitely at the end of their night.  “I got in a fight with some guy,” she told me; I hadn’t asked.  Her eyes were dark and tired.  “Do I look cute?”  She asked me; I didn’t think so – but what can you say?  At the end of the night when someone’s been drinking heavily, their eyes look empty.  I said yeah but winced as I did – like it was a question and an apology wrapped in one; they both laughed.  “Where are you going?”  They asked, and I could hear the invitation tucked inside.

A guy told me his apartment flooded during Hurricane Katrina.  He’d lived in New Orleans his whole life and his voice was low and coarse like maybe it’d been eroded by smoke; or like his vocal chords were used as a barbeque and had many years left but were somehow charred sweet from so much use.  He said during the flood he’d put his newborn son and young daughter onto a blow-up mattress with their mom and tied a rope to it – then he pulled them through the flooded city toward dry land.  He said you could see bodies floating in the water.  It was like a movie, he said, and his wife still has anxiety attacks because of it.  “Something like P..” he stuttered trying to remember the letters, “PTSD or something,” he said.

Every life, seems like, is long and heavy and unique.  When we’re out in public, it’s like everyone can fade together.  We interact with each other as puddles while hiding oceans behind our eyes.

I take off my headphones; I can hear either the clang of a church bell or musicians playing trumpets and tubas and trombones on the streets below.  The melody the church bell sings is the same melody that played from the doorbell at the nightclub I once worked for.  It’s like I’m in a strange dream.

New Orleans is beautiful, and ugly, and creative, and heartbreaking, and soaked rich with flavor.  If my soul could sprout homes as well as music maybe it’d look the same.

Kai Straw

New Orleans, 2023