LA Exit

Some songs are written about a chapter. This one is written out of one — stitched together from the actual songs, and the actual names, of a band I was in a quarter century ago.

If you were there, you'll hear them. "Lucky Star." "Radio Song." "Wide Awake." "In Your Skin." "Anything 4 You." "Forever, From This Moment On." Real songs, real masters — I still have the cassettes, dated in that tight little window between September 2000 and February 2001. Drums, rhythm guitar, and vocals, tracked one tape at a time. And woven right in beside them, the band itself: we were Canon — and before that, we were Eyes Have Miles. Both names are folded into the lyrics, because this is a farewell letter written in the band's own language. "Canon's broken chords." "These Eyes Have Miles now." The band's whole history, carried in two lines.

And Canon wasn't my first road. I'd been playing in bands for years by then — Grinhappy, Bones, and plenty of others. A whole young life spent behind kits and in rehearsal rooms, chasing the thing every band chases.

I'm not movin' to LA / I'm not going that way / I'm already goin' West / In a brand new way

That's the fork this song stands at. Every band that ever tracked a master tape has had the conversation: LA. The push. The move. The life. And the band drama that came with it — the disagreements, the upsets, the treble mock disdain — was showing me exactly what that road held.

Then September 2001 happened, and everything else got small.

I went to Ground Zero as a responder. What I saw there — what everyone who stood in that place carries — changed the way I looked at life itself. I came back seeing it in a new way. And what I wanted, with a clarity I'd never had before, wasn't a tour van or a label meeting. I wanted to create something beautiful. A life. A family. The lifelong dream that had been standing quietly behind all the loud ones.

Call it prediction / Or mind read / Roads don't need walking / To know what's up ahead

Some roads you don't have to walk to know where they go. I could see the whole thing from the exit ramp — and after that September, I knew exactly which road mattered.

So I made the decision. Not a retreat — a choice, made deliberately, with my eyes wide awake:

I'm the author of my story / This ain't no Radio Song / I'm the author of this chapter / And I write it Wide Awake

A softer new beginning, without the Lucky Star strain. A semblance of normal life, done my way. And I have never once regretted it.

But hear what the song doesn't say. It never says I quit. Because I didn't. I never let go of my art — not for one year of the twenty-five that followed. I kept writing. Always writing. The songs went on the back burner, not in the ground, waiting for the day I could get back to producing and creating the songs of my life. If you've heard Floregon, Pacific Interface, Clearwater Nights — you're listening to that day. The back burner was never off.

The bridge draws the line that made the decision for me:

Art is no robotic way / You think it's a metronome of pay / I write from the life I've lived

That's the whole disagreement in three lines. Art as a metronome of pay versus art from a life actually lived. I stepped off the exit and decided to go eight. Thanks for the journey. End of warehouse days.

And there's no bitterness in the goodbye — that matters to me. I wish you all the best. My love runs forever from this moment on. But the last word is a boundary, built from the band's own title, turned around:

But I Won't Do Anything For You

Grinhappy. Bones. Eyes Have Miles. Canon.
The tapes are still here. The songs still play.
The exit was mine. The chapter was mine.
The family was the dream. The art never left.

I'm not movin' to LA.

I've written the next chapter.

I'm goin' my own way.

— 01DW3ST