Track 8 Is About My Wife

Track 8 on Bluebonnet Plague is called “4LE” and it is about my wife.

If you have bought a four-pack of the coffee, you have typed her name into a checkout box. 4LE is the code that takes a four-pack from $50 to $44.

That is not a marketing coincidence and it is not an accident. It is the only discount code I was ever going to use.

Why that one

A record made over ten years is not made in isolation. Somebody lives alongside it. Somebody is there for the stretch where nothing is happening, and the money going out, and the years where the thing refuses to finish.

Putting her on track 8 is the obvious move. Putting her on the checkout page is the one that makes me laugh, because it means she is quietly attached to every four-pack that ships out of here.

How we met

Outside a Donella Drive show at Hi Tones in April 2015, between sets. She was smoking a vape. I tried to bum a cigarette, she did not have one, so I went and found one and came back.

The whole chain of coincidence that put me in that spot — a diner at 2am, a stranger singing reggaeton, a business card — is its own story and it is genuinely ridiculous.

What changed after

A year later I left the bowling alley and went to work at a coffee shop, and getting out of that building got me away from using.

I am not going to claim a person fixed me. That is not how it works and it is unfair to put on somebody. But the timing is the timing, and I am not going to pretend it is unrelated either.

Twins came later. The record is still not out. She has been there for the entire thing.