San Antonio BBQ and the Long Cook

There is a Rebel Lion song called “Sauce That” — a comedic one, whose AI music video won five awards in Los Angeles. It started at a barbecue competition in Port Aransas. That is where the barbecue in all of this comes from — the same way GAMFC was a song before it was a can of coffee. The music comes first and then it leaks into everything else.

And Texas barbecue turns out to be a patience religion, which I did not understand until I had spent a decade on one album.

Low and slow is a working method

A brisket is a tough, cheap, awkward cut. Cook it fast and it is inedible. The only way through is heat low enough to be frustrating, for a length of time that makes no sense to anyone watching, until the connective tissue gives up and the thing becomes what it was always capable of being.

You cannot rush it. You cannot turn the heat up to make up lost ground — that is how you get a dry, grey disappointment with a nice bark. The time is not an obstacle to the result. The time is the result.

I have thought about this a lot while explaining to people why the album was not finished yet.

The stall

Here is the part every pitmaster knows and almost nobody else does.

Somewhere in the middle of a long cook the internal temperature of the meat just stops rising. For hours. The fire is on, the clock is running, and the number will not move. It is called the stall, and it is caused by moisture evaporating off the surface cooling the thing down as fast as the heat goes in.

It is not a failure. Nothing has gone wrong. If you panic and crank the heat you ruin it. The correct response is to leave it alone and let it finish.

Years four through seven of this album were a stall. The fire was on. The number did not move. I did not know at the time that it was a normal part of a long cook rather than evidence I should quit.

San Antonio's version

Central Texas barbecue is the famous one — salt and pepper, post oak, served on butcher paper with no sauce because the meat is supposed to stand by itself.

San Antonio sits where that tradition meets South Texas and northern Mexican cooking, and the city is better for the collision. Barbacoa on Sunday morning is as much a local institution here as brisket is. This is a city that has never been purist about anything, which is one of the better things about it.

Smoke, coffee, bluebonnets, a lion

These four things keep showing up around this record and people ask whether it means anything.

It does, loosely: four things that take their own time or take over on their own terms. Smoke gets into everything and will not wash out. Bluebonnets spread where nobody planted them. Cold brew sits for twelve hours because there is no faster way. And a lion does not hurry.

None of that was designed on a whiteboard. It accumulated, which is sort of the point.