My brother and I don’t look alike, but we both look like our dad.
Technically we’re half-brothers, but I’ve always felt uncomfortable making that distinction. Too many people seem to think a half-sibling and a stepsibling are the same thing. Even if they do understand the concept—which is rarer than you might believe—there’s always a tone that implies our relationship is inherently less. We have the same last name, grew up in the same spots, and have the same blood running through our veins. We’re brothers, period.
Our only real separation has always been time. If you want to put it in terms of Spielberg movies—and honestly, why wouldn’t you—Jeremy was born about eight months after Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, and I was born about six months after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade came out. Incidentally, my brother’s favorite Indiana Jones movie is Temple of Doom, and my favorite movie about aliens is Aliens, but it isn’t personal in either direction.
Because of the age gap, approximately 11 years, we didn’t grow up together in the traditional sense. He was always around, and I thought he was the absolute coolest, but he was graduating high school when I was in the first grade. We didn’t begin properly bonding until I was a teenager and we could talk about Saturday Night Live sketches and KISS records. Then, magically, when I was in my 20s, we became best friends. That’s a common trajectory for siblings, I’m told.
One of our greatest adventures together happened in the fall of 2015, when we loaded into my Ford Ranger and drove across the country with a zip bag of burned CDs and a cooler.
…
The Review
P!nk
M!ssundaztood
2001
Alecia Moore’s life changed color when she became P!nk.
Moore had been grinding away in girl groups since she was 15, but by 1999, her biggest claim to fame had been a soundtrack contribution to the Shaq-driven genie film Kazaam. Given an ultimatum by her label, she reluctantly decided to transition into a career as a solo artist. Two years later, she had sold two million records, toured with *NYSYNC, and participated in the largest airplay-only radio single in human history with “Lady Marmalade.”
Backstage at a photo shoot for Teen Magazine in the spring of 2001, she sat weighing her options. Her success was undeniable, but reviews for her debut record Can’t Take Me Home had been mixed at best. More than one critic accused her of appropriating the well-established sound of acts like Destiny’s Child and TLC. She had been marketed as a white R&B singer, readymade for branding and merchandise, buy low and sell high. It wasn’t the dream she thought she wanted.
Like magic, a phone number fell into her lap.
P!nk’s stylist worked with several high profile clients, and while absentmindedly going through her list of contacts, she found the information for Linda Perry of 4 Non Blondes. Back in the not-too-far-gone days of being simply Alecia Moore, P!nk had used 4 Non Blondes’ debut (and only) record as something of a divining rod. She was even once nearly arrested for screaming its lyrics out of her suburban bedroom window in the middle of the night. P!nk took the number and left Perry a 10-minute voicemail begging to write together and threatening to stalk her if she declined. Amused, intrigued, possibly fearful, Perry agreed.
In their first session together, P!nk and Perry wrote the song “Eventually.” Over the course of six weeks, another 20 songs followed. Only one outside track was considered, an experimental dance pop tune Perry had originally written for Madonna, called “Get the Party Started.”
Riding that wave of inspiration, the duo entered the studio and made what would become M!ssundaztood.
When a record kicks off with its title track, it’s usually a red flag. It almost always means they’re putting their strongest foot forward and then coasting on filler, using the oldschool trick of selling an album on the strength of its single. Here, however, the song “M!ssundaztood” serves its full purpose as a proper mission statement, both lyrically and sonically. It’s a breezy, lo-fi, garage rock banger where P!nk tells us she’s happy to have us on the journey with her, but to buckle up because the sounds we’re used to hearing from her are about to change.
The finishing blow to that knockout combination of an opener is “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” a brutally honest confession of her experiences in the music industry thus far. Lyrically, it’s light years ahead of its peers in terms of emotional realism and brash bravery. For example, there’s the line “LA told me, you’ll be a pop star, all you have to do is change everything you are.” That may not seem like much at first blush, but she’s literally calling out the owner of her label, LA Reid, by name.
M!ssundaztood runs the gambit of hilariously uplifting anthems like “18 Wheeler” to deeply personal introspection like “Family Portrait.” P!nk’s own mother compared the album’s lyrics to poems she had found in Moore’s childhood bedroom. The poems in question were so ruminative and advanced that they left her mother—an ER nurse—emotionally disturbed.
What makes P!nk’s sophomore offering so iconic isn’t that it reinvented the genre—which it did—or that we’re still talking about it nearly 25 years later—which we are. It isn’t even that she traded in her sure-thing career as an R&B singer on a gamble to find her own voice against her label’s wishes. All those things are contributing factors, sure, but what elevates it above everything else is how fucking fun it is. It’s trauma with a danceable beat.
When P!nk delivered the tapes to her label, the response was tepid. LA Reid in particular was sure that M!ssundaztood would stop her burgeoning career cold. After a few weeks of deliberation, he reluctantly decided to release the album so that its failure would teach her a lesson.
M!ssundaztood went quintuple platinum in the U.S., sold 13 million copies worldwide and spawned three massive hits. To this day it remains P!nk’s bestselling record.
If you’re wondering what this record has to do with my brother, or the story I’m about to tell, the answer is … absolutely nothing. It’s just a cool record that doesn’t get mentioned enough anymore.
…
The Tale
Driving across the length of the United States in a two-seater pickup truck with no backseat is an insane thing in which to do voluntarily.
I’ve driven across the country four times. Two of those times were in a van with a band; the other two were in that Ranger. Travel like that makes you immediately understand why a covered wagon full of pioneers stopped somewhere in the Midwest and founded a town on a random dirt patch instead of making it all the way to an ocean. Even with air conditioning and music, it’s a Herculean task that seems never-ending. Not everyone can handle it. All the truck stops and fast-food drive-thrus blur together into a delirium that crawls all over you quicker than you would anticipate.
If you’re going to do it with another person, it must be someone you trust with your life and sanity. As crazy as it sounds, it’s best to travel with a talker. I never made those drives with the modern conveniences of streaming services and podcasts. When it came time to cross multiple states lines I white knuckled it through the desert with road-trip specific mix CDs and chit chat like a true American. Even if I did have all the luxuries afforded to today’s driver, I would still bring a talker with me.
Ideally, you want someone who can challenge the gristle in your brain when the sun shines off the blacktop and begins to fry it. When the endless miles and Bo Diddley tunes lull you into a comfortable Juba rhythm and suddenly you snap back after 100 miles wondering how you got there, it’s best to have someone take the wheel. Even when you’re in the passenger seat, however, you want someone to help you remember anything other than the thousands of miles left before you can rest your weary bones. On the way to California, Justin was my copilot. On the way back, it was my brother Jeremy.
Before we headed off on the great adventure, my brother and I met Justin to film a short video. We were in the parking lot of a local ambulance company where my then girlfriend worked, the only place I knew where we could hang out for a bit without raising any eyebrows. That video is still online, and while it certainly isn’t groundbreaking, there’s something about it that I still find hauntingly charming. Justin filmed me saying goodbye to the Randomland fans, hopping in my truck, and driving away. We never called cut or got a second take. When you see me driving away in the video, I’m really driving away. That video captures my literal last words on California soil, a true clean break.
My brother and I kept driving until big California cities gradually transitioned into small desert communities. One thing I always loved about my time out west is that you could go from the middle of Sunset Boulevard to the middle of nowhere faster than you would think possible. That morning, I had woken up in a bustling Orange County neighborhood only to now find myself on a sunset-drenched road where the desert seemed to stretch out infinitely in either direction. Before, I couldn’t run to the corner store without passing 500 people, and now there was a very real chance that if the truck broke down, hours would go by with no signs of human life.
There was one genuinely frightening moment deep in the night after we crossed into Arizona.
Jeremy and I were pulled over because the light illuminating my tag had gone out, unbeknownst to us. Judging by the officer’s attitude, this was the criminal equivalent of burning down a Wendy’s. This incident took place during the final year of the Obama administration, before the relationship between cops and citizens was where it is today. We hadn’t yet experienced the tragedies of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. ACAB wouldn’t become a hashtag for a couple years yet. Still, I had never had warm feelings about the police.
During my first year of college, in the middle of the night, I had taken a left turn out of a right turn only area. A cop turned on his lights, but there was no place for us to safely pull over. Knowing this I turned on my flashers, slowed down, and pulled into the first available entrance I could find. In response, I was forcibly pulled from my car and slammed against the hood. The officer held a gun to my back while he waited for backup, who assessed the situation and hurriedly let me go with a warning. A couple years before that, when I was in high school, I was pulled over after leaving a friend’s house and made to do a field sobriety test in the bone-chilling cold for the entertainment of a half-dozen officers. I was a stone sober, terrified kid.
Even without those experiences under my belt—not to mention several more—I would have been just as nervous. We weren’t doing anything illegal, nor did we have any illicit substances, but we were in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night. We were viscerally aware that anything could happen, and it was totally beyond our control. Stephen King had literally written a novel with nearly this exact plot called Desperation. Adding to the anticipation was the fact that the ordeal was taking a long time, and backup had been called.
“You know what we should do,” my brother offered, adding levity to the situation, “We should just tell them we’re Harlin Evans’ grandsons.”
Our grandfather—Harlin to everyone else, but ‘Pap’ to us—wouldn’t have had any cache in the Arizona desert, of course. He wasn’t a known entity or a well-connected figure. He was a badass, our hero, but unless you frequented the Senior Center dances back home, you probably wouldn’t know him. Still, we had a lot of fun sitting in the truck, playing out the scenario for each other. We speculated that, maybe if we said it, the whole tone and tenor of the confrontation would change. Maybe they would offer us a warm bed, an apology, and a couple of local farmer’s daughters for our trouble. In the end, though, the situation dissipated without any significant drama. They reluctantly decided to let us go if we agreed to stop in Williams, Arizona for the night and see the local mechanic first thing the next morning.
We had been planning to stay in Williams anyway, because we wanted to see the Grand Canyon while we were in the neighborhood.
I’ll never forget that night in Williams. Jeremy and I made fast friends with some French travelers who were on an extended sightseeing trip through the States. We mostly communicated with them through hand gestures and Google Translate. Among their ranks was a barefooted beauty named Delphine who took a real shine to me for some reason. She was gorgeous—truth be told, I might still be in love with her—but I was seeing someone and, even if I wasn’t, I’ve never had the Bond-like skills to properly handle a situation like that. I need a long runway to charm via texting and an autistically passionate level of music knowledge that I’ve been told is endearing in short bursts. That night, instead of getting up to anything salacious, we happily drank terrible alcohol in their balmy room while listening to French rap at deafening decibels and watching Al Jazeera videos.
One thing I didn’t know about the Grand Canyon is how surprisingly far away it is from civilization. In my memory, it was a 45-minute drive from our hotel to the rim. There’s only one way in and out, and everyone is there for the same reason. After all the time you just spent trying to get to it, there comes a moment where you’re not sure what to do with it. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an aethereal wonder, truly breathtaking, but after a minute, you’ve just sort of … seen it. There’s only so long you can drink in the views and contemplate infinity or whatever. After a bit, you start wondering if the drive-thru you saw on the way in is going to price-gouge because they’re your only option—They are—or if you should wait to eat until you get a little further down the road.
After a hilariously short amount of time, we gave each other the nod and hopped back on the road.
Jeremy and I had made a deal to sleep in a different state each night. Since our first night was spent in Arizona, our second had to be in New Mexico. When we passed over the state line, we were both feeling so fresh that we kept driving. After a while, we noticed it had been a suspiciously long time since we had seen a town. Soon we became so exhausted and desperate that we agreed to pull over the next time we saw the lights of civilization, even if that meant sleeping in the parking lot of Hell itself. I remember the feeling of jubilation coming over a hill and seeing what looked like a big city, and being half-worried it was a mirage. Come to find out, it was Albuquerque. Breaking Bad had only been off the air for a couple of years, so like true out-of-towners, we joked with motel clerk about it.
“Are we close to any of the stuff we saw on Breaking Bad?” we asked with a laugh.
“Oh, nah man, we’re a couple of miles from the war zone,” he said without looking up.
I’ve never been a fan of New Mexico, personally. I’m sure it’s great, I don’t mean to disparage an entire state, I’ve just never had a good time there. On the Mark Twain Tour, we broke down in New Mexico. When Justin and I drove through on my way to California in 2013, a spooky lady with a pentagram necklace gave me a horrible witch-eyed look when I tried to buy Doritos from her, and then aliens abducted my alternator in Roswell. It’s probably cooler if you’re into the pottery scene, and I know it has an incredible history, but anytime I’m there, I feel an unusual wave of unease in my belly until I’m once again outside of its borders.
Truth is that all the dust-covered states and towns start to blur together when you’re on the road and unsure of your surroundings. It’s always another sunrise, another sunset, another McDonald’s and another Love’s. I wondered as we drove what these small communities must have been like when Route 66 was still a neon-clad force. Driving by boarded up dreams that felt today like a rattlesnake waiting to strike wasn’t the same America my father had seen on this same drive in the summer of 1969. Maybe every generation has their own America, and that’s why we have so much trouble now agreeing on what it’s supposed to be.
After Albuquerque, we drove into Shamrock, Texas.
We had attempted to book a room in the local Motel 6, but one glimpse of the parking lot suggested that even the local drug fiends probably went out of their way to avoid it. Instead, we found a surprisingly opulent feeling boutique room around the corner and turned in early. I remember that we were laughing about an incredibly awkward encounter my brother had with a Native American man outside of a roadside burger stand. Feeling overwhelmed by white man’s guilt, we had separately given him cash when we crossed his path. When we got back in the truck, cool November air and gray skies ahead, my brother said to me:
“Did you tell that guy Happy Thanksgiving?”
“Of course not,” I said with a laugh.
“Well fuck …” he said “I did.”
We stopped off in Oklahoma City the next day to stand in a moment of silence at the bombing site. I was in kindergarten when the bombing happened, so my memories of it are vague and tied mostly to television. My brother was in high school, so his memories are tangible and visceral. It was quiet and surprisingly overwhelming, standing there and taking it all in. The capacity of the human spirit to endure, to rebuild, to overcome … the strength of that community is enough to bring you to tears. It was around that time that Jeremy and I started referring to the trip as us “Looking for America,” inspired by the Simon & Garfunkel song. Growing up, America is a concept sold to you through Ford commercials and Bob Seger songs. Then, if you’re lucky, you find yourself standing on the grounds of a memorial site in Oklahoma City, baptizing your soul in its waters.
The citizens of Sallisaw, Oklahoma assured us we wouldn’t find the America we were looking for there.
Sallisaw was the next map dot we agreed to make our camp for the night. It was little more than a motel, a casino and a Mexican restaurant. Decades before this, Sallisaw might have been a happening spot. I don’t know the geography or the history, but I could see it having a booming past commerce based around convoys and wanderers. Whatever the case, it now stood desolate and waning. Any hope of fortune and glory had long died away, and now my brother and I were bumbling into its remains.
As we were checking into our room, I tried asking the woman behind the counter what we should check out while we were in town, but she was in no mood for my aw-shucks southern fried bullshit. In fact, she seemed to be directly in the middle of breaking up with her boyfriend, who was also in the room with us. They didn’t seem to want to take a moment to deal with me, and I knew better than to shift their focus, so I waited until she came over to me with tears in her eyes.
“How, um … How do you like Sallisaw?” I asked awkwardly.
“I fucking hate it here,” she said as she plopped our key on the counter.
Without the much-needed guidance of a local, Jeremy and I dropped off our bags and wandered across the street to the casino. Neither of us have ever been gamblers, outside of the occasional scratcher, but we figured we could grab a whiskey and get our bearings. Both the casino and our hotel seemed to be populated mostly by truckers, speed freaks, and the general doomed. Testing the waters, I decided to take a chance and ask our bartender the same question I had asked the clerk across the street.
“Hey man, how do you like Sallisaw?”
“I fucking hate it here,” he said more to himself than me.
Crossing into Arkansas the following morning, we saw trees for the first time on our trip. I don’t think either of us fully realized how sick of the desert we were until we saw those trees on Dwight by-God Eisenhower’s Interstate System. They were slowly dying in the late November chill, but they were still green enough to inspire some much-needed reinvigoration. We rode that joy all the way to the place where joy goes to die, West Memphis.
As I said earlier, Jeremy and I agreed to sleep in a different state every single night. Just across the bridge was a well-reviewed Double Tree in Elvis’s Memphis, Tennessee, but we had both spent plenty of nights in Tennessee throughout our lives. So, reluctantly, we decided to spend Thanksgiving 2015 in West Memphis, Arkansas. Yes, that West Memphis, the one from the books, documentaries and podcasts. We had Thanksgiving dinner at the local Waffle House, where we were the only guests, and then barricaded ourselves in our room for a sleepless night where we wished we had simply crossed the bridge instead.
Before we knew it, the trip was almost over. There’s a period where you think the finish line is never coming, only to then find yourself bouncing off it like the business end of a Mack truck. Our last drive was a 10-hour trek from Memphis to our hometown in North Georgia. By that time, my CD player had stopped working and we were relying solely on FM radio and conversation, which turned out to be more than enough. It was the opposite of the last drive, this time coming home instead of starting a new life far away in another state. I had no idea what I was going to do next, just that I was so happy to be back in my world. Our family had pushed Thanksgiving dinner to that Sunday in anticipation for our arrival.
When we sat at the table, we had a story to tell.
…
The Aftermath
It’s been almost a decade since we took that drive.
There’s something about a journey like that … It has a strangely purifying effect. It’s arduous, monotonous, but by the time you reach the end, you find yourself weirdly wishing there were more miles left. I understand now why musicians become addicted to the road; some of the greatest adventures of my life have happened simply by walking out of my front door. Riding the highways allowed me to get to know my country—and more importantly, my brother—better. I wish more people could have that experience.
When we think about travel, most of us yearn to get out of the States and discover something far across the sea. I’m no exception; I would love to see every inch of England, Australia, Argentina, Egypt, Japan, or even just Canada. One of the most important things I learned from that drive, however, is how much cool stuff there is to explore here at home. There are so many bizarre roadside attractions, amazing national parks and spooky homegrown folklore. Everywhere you go, around every corner, there’s some local something begging to be discovered.
A lot of American towns are similar in the fact that it’s just restaurants and movie theaters everywhere you go, but each place has a history and something unique to offer. There’s so much evil and darkness in the world right now, but I truly believe that most of this country is populated by kind people who want to relate to each other and trade sourdough bread recipes. Maybe that’s naive, but in my experience, it’s true. Perhaps the people in power want us divided so we’ll forget how much we have in common.
Traveling is expensive, so if nothing else, take a moment this week and explore your community as if you’re a tourist. Go to the local diner and order the special. Visit the closest museum and ask the docent meaningful questions. Take the ghost tour, buy a locally brewed beer, spend $5 to watch a local band give it everything they’ve got. Take a second and get to know your hometown.
You may be surprised by what you find.
