It had been a minute since I released anything new but it finally happened…The Hollow Men is out in the world, careening its way thru space & time…and mostly the YouTubes. Go check it out. Its a wild ride. 

I woke up on the morning of February 15, 2021 to the power being out and several pipes in the house having burst overnight thanks to the king hell winter storm that rolled in. It was well-known that a big storm was coming, and I prepared as best I could--wrapped exposed pipes & even cut the water to the little shack I rented in the back yard from the main house--but to no avail. Complete disaster. The power came back on 70 hours later. I finally got hot water restored a full 3 weeks later. It was quite the ride.

So that's where the idea for the song came from, and lyrically it's not much. A whole lot of repeated lines. Writing it was easy enough, and it being 2021, with live shows still very slowly ramping up again in Austin, we started messing around with it in Todd's home studio. It wasn't ever meant to be a serious project because once we started toying with drum machines and synths, it was clearly not a typical Memphis Strange song. So we'd play with sounds for a couple of hours and leave it alone to work on other songs, revisiting it every few months (more like once a year probably) until we finally said enough is enough, it's as done as it's gonna get. Maybe even overdone. Hard to say after so long. That was in the spring of 2025. I went to Montana from June to October and then a few weeks ago it dawned on me that the 5-year anniversary of the storm was approaching. Seemed like the perfect time to put the song out. And why not make a video? How hard could that be? 

Kinda hard, it turns out. But with the help of my fearless if semi-autistic robot interns, it only took about 40 hours of feeling like a complete moron moving things around on a computer screen, pacing back & forth, cursing the entire idea, starting over a few times, and blankly staring at the ceiling wondering what contest in hell I'd won. But it's done, and the guys in the band liked it enough to green light the release, so it's out there now. And maybe more importantly it's out of my head. 

I like it. It was fun to record the song and it was fun and challenging to make the video. Not sure if I'll do another or not. I'd rather do just about anything over sitting in front of a computer screen. But we are nearing the finish line on several new recordings and I did have to subscribe to CapCut to unlock most of the effects I used on the animation, so never say never I guess. But I need a little break to go fishing. And I'm still wrangling the summer schedule into something that makes sense. And I've got seeds I promised to start for my sister's garden. 

I probably need a few more robot interns.