Redshift
A 12-song album to soundtrack moonsilvered night drives on the patchy back roads of a sprawling soundscape—out where the county lines of art-folk, indie rock, and Americana meet.
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A Cross on a Gravel Road (Music Video)
WARNING: Spirits in the mirror are closer than they appear in this midwest ghost story.
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Homemade Horror Show '23
Every October since 2018, on a coffin-black night in Chicago, local indie filmmakers and horror buffs gather to make their offerings to Homemade Horror Show—an annual anthology of indie horror/comedy shorts.
Watch a live, solo version of “Cracks”
A stripped-down, live, solo version of "Cracks" from our debut show at the Hideout in Chicago last August
A Handful of Mud
So Before we go There’s something you ought to know There are bones In the shipwrecks below Holding their dying pose And they went Clawing for breath Clinging to hope that They would make it Out Mmm Out And when The panic sets in And your body betrays you
(The Graves of the Glaciers)
(The lapping of waves—as the moon fingerpicks gently the morning lake water—mixes with indecipherable, ancient, whispered secrets about the true nature of the universe, time, being, etc., all suddenly grasped at last, albeit ephemerally)
Till the End Time Begins
Blue bleeds through the blinds Another new year The same old lang synes Come… come… I saved your birthday cards “Your twenties,” you wrote “are gonna be hard” But there’s empty fifths in your trash And there’s questions that I’m too terrified to ask Yeah… Feel the
Old Bruise
Your uncle’s on his shit again Four fingers of Midleton Nursing all his lone regrets Laughing off his eulogy That all the fools he used to be And all the men he might have been Wound up him instead What will you have when you’re looking back Once
lyrics
Days Burn Down
I hear the drum of a desperate moth Caught in the screen and glass The streetlights reach in through the curtain cloth Stretching the shadows cast We pick ourselves from the city’s teeth Throw some worn-out record on And each of our breaths is deafening In the silence between
lyrics
The Life I'll Leave You
Do those sirens always blow? Did this time bomb finally explode? They want you all in cities now Herded on the coasts The center cannot hold And you’ll be armed with nothing but your conscience when it goes If you make it out you can stay with me, yeah
lyrics
A Trusty Lie
The ninth drink delivers The lines you've prewritten And a voice like yours admits no wrong I swirl the ice inside my glass Drowning out the very last words I should say I guess that Everybody’s got a trusty lie they tell We fool ourselves with our
lyrics
Cracks
All the trees flail their skeleton hands Warning us to double back We trudge through the boot prints Strangers cut through this And make it out in someone else’s tracks Gentler weather held you together But this rough stretch rends your seams The sidewalks go jagged And the highways
lyrics
Sleeveless Hearts
Your sleeveless heart It starts its fire for the night Kindles its conviction with some lines From books you’ve barely put a crease in You’re in the dark And all lit up on your father’s gin You nihilist, you feel no consequence Of needing nothing to believe
A Cross on a Gravel Road
A Cross on a Gravel Road
I said ‘Elizabeth, I know You can’t wait to get out of here But I bet you look back when you’re leaving’ We were the lone lights on the road Drifting over county lines A bottle at our feet She said ‘I know this place too well to
The Okay Lakes
Listen to "Redshift" the debut album from The Okay Lakes — out today
The 12-song LP is a cinematic soundtrack to a night drive on the patchy back roads of a sprawling Midwest soundscape, out where the county lines of baroque folk, art rock, and Americana meet.
The Okay Lakes
"Redshift" is a song about feeling like a stranger in a place you used to belong
Hear the title track off the album (out next week!)
The Okay Lakes
"Cracks" is an art-folk tone poem about the dueling brutality/beauty of Chicago winters
A simple, windswept, string-laden guitar tune that sounds best when played with frost-bitten fingers
The Okay Lakes
My debut album "Redshift" is out on February 23
Watch the album art trailer and get details on the album release show at Hideout in Chicago
The Okay Lakes
How I made my new song "A Cross on a Gravel Road"
An anthem to soundtrack late-night drives on the back roads
The Okay Lakes
The story of "A Cross on a Gravel Road" starts on the backroads of northern Michigan
The rest of the song of "A Cross on a Gravel Road” took a long time to find. And when it finally arrived, it lit the way for the rest of the album’s songs to follow. The central image, however, was immediate.