For a glimpse into the brainpan of America, you can’t beat late-night AM radio with its paranoid callers, heavy-breathing preachers, and baroque debates about whether aliens are interfering with our thoughts.
“—they might not be fuzzy little beings at all. But that doesn’t automatically make them devils or representatives of Lucifer. It might make them simply creations, just as we are creations. And we could have been tampered with.”
“Well, I think they’re tampering with us now.”
It’s the sound of a nation mumbling to itself late at night, long after it should have gone to bed. Driving alone in the dark, I’m moved by these lonely and sometimes frantic voices searching for a pattern in the stars, their souls, or the CIA that might provide clues for how to live.
Tonight I stitched together a few recordings from a late-night drive and added some reverb and drone. And somewhere between the discussion about alien tampering and the angel of death, you can hear my turn signal blinking while I idled at an empty intersection in the middle of America.
