LISTEN: "A Cross on a Gravel Road" 🌗 Out Now

An anthem to soundtrack late-night drives on the back roads

It’s hard to put into words how excited I am to share my latest song, “A Cross on a Gravel Road.” This one’s meant a lot to me, been a secret I’ve been keeping, for a long time.

It’s a song about reaching that point in life when you know you have to leave home. It’s about wanting to bring parts of home you love with you, and about knowing you can’t. It’s to be listened to loudly. Scream-sung along to in the car.

Out on the back roads, of course.

Story of the Song

I fell in love with so much of the music that changed my life on road trips through the Midwest. Out on the back roads, especially, songs and I found each other.

As a kid, I wore out my first favorite album in a Sony Disc Man, listening in the passenger and back seat. That album started with the first song I recall making me feel… almost possessed, as if it was filling me with some spirit other than my own. That song was (kiss whatever cool indie cred I could’ve maybe had goodbye) The Wallflowers’ “One Headlight,” which still slaps.

It was much in the same way that, as a teenager, I came to love the albums that would shape my musical tastes, from bands like Doves, Radiohead, Hey Rosetta, and Sufjan Stevens. Those albums are full of ghosts now. Some nights, when the moon’s right and the roads clear, I put them on, and their old ghosts speak to me in ways they did back then.

Sonically, I wanted “Cross” to have that ethereal-yet-grounded quality of that first song I fell in love with. I wanted to marry that with the sprawling, cinematic soundscapes of the albums I grew to love as a teenager.

Lyrically, I wanted to speak to those younger selves, who haven’t yet realized they’ll never really lose themselves again. Of course… every time I play the song now, the ghosts of those younger selves, instead, speak to me.

I hope they speak to you, too.

–JK