SPOTLIGHT: ‘Fast Food’ and Other Road Realities from Humbird [VIDEO]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Humbird is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for April 2024. Learn more about her and her new album, Right On, in our interview. And don’t miss her recent essay about songs and how they find us.

Many of the songs on Humbird’s new album, Right On, came into focus on the highway. Siri Undlin has had lots of time to contemplate America (specifically, the Midwest, where she makes her home) through the windows of a van as she’s made her way from show to show in the past few years.

The song “Fast Food” stemmed directly from van time, when Undlin and bandmate Pat Keen “were having some deep reflections on how it felt to have eaten Taco Bell too many times in a row,” she says in the video below. But of course the song is about much more than that. It’s about routine and monotony, and the toll that can take on a touring artist. “Eating fast food inside the white lines / It all tastes the same on that interstate drive,” she laments in the song, and she goes on to acknowledge some of the mental (and literal) costs of making a life in music.

Hear the song in full in this acoustic performance from Humbird exclusively for No Depression readers: