Bleed Out Tracklist
From the vinyl:
Out in the streets the mood was unstable so we found a place in the woods. On safer days, we’re almost always at the clubhouse, but these were weird times, so it was good to gather and break bread. Everybody seemed to have ducked the radar during the long raids: Rochester Pete with his whitewalls and his mutton chops, Money Matt immaculate as usual, the Harleysville Kid somehow looking even better than he otherwise does, and me, blinking my eyes against the daylight. A little dirty. Something raw inside me, something brittle that didn’t want to break.
Alicia the Architect pulled up in her pickup with a dog riding shotgun and an arsenal of inconspicuously housed weapons in the bed. In those cardboard-and-canvas cases lay the story of our week ahead: big scores, wild times. Right behind her was the fixer, the one they call Young Shalini, fresh talent from the mid-south, sharp as tacks, no arrests and no convictions. They say it takes a lifetime to learn how to read a rifle sight, but Young Shalini does not miss.
I’d put together the plans for the caper quickly, over the course of a month in December. I used to work this fast all the time, back in the early days; muscle memory brought it all back to me now. I studied the soldiers who’d gone before me, and I memorized their moves. We spent about half a day at the range, sizing up targets, and then we took our work out into the field: six of us, stir-crazy, staved for action, finally free to show some aces to a world that had been dealing us hard hand after hard hand for almost a year; and most noir tales like these are fantasy, but for four friends who in normal times get to play music together practically every month and who’d been forced into hiding by the circumstances of the Year of Our Lord 2020, this was the real thing. Late meals around a common table. Tales from solitary to share. Stacking our chips in secret, rolling dice until dawn. A few blazing muzzles in the wintry night. Made ready by circumstance for whatever came next, but not yet ready to bleed out.
