Setting on the West
an Album in 60 Minutes: For the Century
“Here’s the Thing”
Essays of Today & Tomorrow
I saw failure’s night, spent bleary-eyed lying-in heaps of sweat, moaning “these are the days when all is done, and you didn’t do it:”
I chose rejection.
— Adam Dane
Setting on the West
an Album in 60 Minutes: For the Century
“Here’s the Thing”
Essays of Today & Tomorrow
[What is the broader music practice — how drumming, composition, and collaboration fit together.]
A novel. The working title names a direction more than a place — something about the way light falls at the end of a day you can’t quite account for.
The book began as an image that wouldn’t resolve: a figure on a road at the edge of something — a town, a season, a version of themselves. That image became a first chapter, and the first chapter became a longer question about what people carry when they leave and what they leave when they can’t carry it anymore.
It moves between past and present, between two people whose lives intersect late, when most of the damage is already done. What holds it together is not plot but a quality of attention — the way certain moments slow down to reveal everything that wasn’t said.
You can set out west your whole life and still be standing in the same place.
The manuscript is underway. It exists right now in the way most things do at this stage — as a draft that knows what it wants to be and hasn’t quite got there yet. There is something clarifying about that distance.
More here as it develops. For now: this is a novel about leaving, about the west as a real place and an idea about freedom that turns out to be more complicated than expected, and about two people who meet too late and not too late at all.