A Postcard From Andrew Duhon

EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to No Depression’s new “Postcard From” series, where we ask artists for a dispatch from their daily lives on the road, in the studio, or anywhere in between. Our next installment comes from Andrew Duhon, who releases his new single “Waco Kool-Aid” today and is on tour this fall.

The loudest voices on the biggest platforms don’t sound like the voices I hear playing pool at the dive bar or at the diners or coffee shops and at shows across the country. For more than a decade, I’ve hit the road in the interest of sharing my songs, but the real reward is the conversation after my story is told. To hear someone else’s take, someone else’s version of heartbreak, longing, sure, even political discontent, is the truest way I’ve known to zero in on this human condition of ours together, and to understand each other a little better.

Touring across the country in a van has given me a perspective that doesn’t come exclusively through a screen that’s curated by experts of my biases. Granted, I’m not surprised to hear different opinions in Beaumont, Texas than I do in Seattle, Washington. But from conversations between real people across America, it’s the similarities about what we want and concerns about where we are that stick with me more than the differences of opinion on how we fix it.  To buy into one polarized side or another is to choose one story over the other, when there’s likely some truth to both, even if that’s uncomfortable. The longform accounts of real people don’t fit squarely into the story on the screen, and I’m honored to hear such stories when folks offer them.

“Waco Kool-Aid” is my own double-take on our polarized society. My journey as a songwriter is an attempt to tell my truest and most personal story because I’m the only one who can tell that version. I think having told someone a story like that, listeners are more willing to open up their own personal story. Everyone is different, and yet, the collage of personal perspectives is more concise than I would have thought — not in their details, but in their fears about today and hopes for tomorrow. We want to take care of each other. No one wants to argue, but we do want to be heard, and we do want to listen, too. Not to the politician, but to the real person who may disagree with us in hopes of understanding our differences better.

We want the idea of the American Dream to prosper so that we can prosper. The collective American story today has a common theme, and that’s become evident to me not from an infinite scrolling algorithm, but from traveling the highway that connects the miles between my country boy buddies in Texas and my hippie pals in the Pacific Northwest. The loudest voices are not telling the story of who we really are collectively, and it’s essential that we do so ourselves one coffee chat at a time, one dive bar story at a time, one song at a time.