Four Things That Take Their Own Time

A lion, a wildflower, a brisket and a can of coffee. People ask if that is a brand strategy. It is not. It accumulated, and then one day it was obvious what it had been doing.

The bluebonnet

The state flower of Texas, and the thing the album is named after. Every spring it takes over — roadsides, medians, the cracked edge of a road you have driven a thousand times and never once looked at.

Nobody plants it. Nobody approves it. It is simply there, all at once, and there is nothing to be done about it. Calling that a plague is a joke about making something nobody asked for, by somebody nobody appointed. More on the flower itself here.

The smoke

This one arrived through a song. “Sauce That” is a Rebel Lion single whose video took five festival awards, and barbecue has been attached to the project ever since.

It is the patience one. Twelve hours minimum, a stall in the middle where nothing happens and you must not panic, and a cut of meat that is only worth anything because somebody was willing to wait.

Smoke also does not wash out. It is in your clothes and your hair for days. Things that get into everything and will not leave — that is the same idea as the flower, wearing different clothes.

The coffee

GAMFC was a song before it was a drink. The track exists, it has been streaming since 2022, and the coffee came after.

Cold brew is the third version of the same idea: twelve hours of sitting in cold water because there is no faster route to that result. Heat it up to speed it along and you have made a different, worse drink.

Water and coffee. Two ingredients, a lot of time.

The lion

The one that is about me rather than about Texas.

Rebel Lion is a pun that has outlived its own joke. But a lion is also the animal everybody agrees is the king while it spends most of the day doing nothing in particular. It does not hurry and it does not explain itself. At thirty-six, a decade into a record nobody was waiting for, that is either aspirational or self-deprecating and I have stopped trying to decide.

For the one show, it stops being a metaphor. There is a full prosthetic lion head being built, worn for most of the set. Ten thousand dollars of the budget is that head. Some jokes you have to see through.

The through line

Four things that take their own time, or take over on their own terms, and cannot be hurried without being ruined.

Ten years on one album will do that to your symbol set.