I Lost It and the Search for Authentic Expression
Summer of 2022 was a time of particular transition for Regular Humans, a band marked by transition. Nick and I had just played Chomp Santa Fe the month before, each of us playing drums with our feet. For this show, we recruited Jake Montiel and Justin Pucila of Brother Sound and Free Range Buddhas to play lead guitar and drums, respectively. Nick played bass, the only show in our career together where that happened.
The structure of the band was in flux, and so were our lives. I had moved down from El Valle for a very brief stay in the casita in Español, and then to an RV on the run down, sprawling property where Nick lived in Pojoaque, down in the immense Pojoaque valley of Northern New Mexico. Two moves in three months, and figuring out electricity, internet, and water to an old RV presented its challenges. Including that I was unable to host rehearsals in my space, as I typically did. For a short time, we met in Nick’s living room, which had to be totally upended to accommodate that. Nick allowed it but wasn’t thrilled.
What happens when creative energy – years of weekly work together – faces such instability? The normal rhythms of me hosting, the seasonal migration around the El Valle house: from woodstove in winter to the coolest back bedroom when it got warm.
That woodstove needed regular feeding to combat the frigid air, that winter afternoon when Nick arrived in his yellow and orange 80s Toyota Van. His dogs jumped out when he pulled through the two gates – he got the top one and I opened the bottom. After greeting we set up in the living room. We opened with a long improvisation to warm up, and then moved into another improvisation: what turned into a bridge into Browning Winter. That’s the music titled “Approaching Winter” on Humans, that music of indeterminate destination paired with a much later performance of the Regular Human original Browning Winter, the only song Nick and I composed together.
It was in the context and time of transition that we worked with Jake. A friend of Nick’s from Santa Fe, he came out to the Española casita once, and then to rehearse at Nick’s a separate time. The casita session we captured on multitrack, where he played lap steel guitar. Some songs from that session may end up on Humans. These are songs that carry this very particular time in the evolution of the band, when we gave up the feet drums. It was just too much and we would rather work with others than do it ourselves.
When Jake and Justin agreed to do that second Chomp show where this version of I Lost It comes from, we moved through the transitions with another little shakeup. Nick played bass and I played electric, a setup that happened exactly once live.
Nick and I had just played Chomp Santa Fe the month before, that time with us each playing drums with our feet.
I Lost It is one that I’ve covered for a long time, drawn to Lucinda Williams’ masterful lyrics about the feeling of an undefined it—faith? groundedness? a favorite sweater?—left along a back road somewhere, something that money can’t replace and memory can’t erase. It’s a song about the desire for authenticity in life, work, and love. The lyrics bring me chills every time.
Of all the songs that I suggested to Jake to play, he loved this suggestion. The song first appeared on Williams’ excellent Happy Woman Blues and later pulled forward onto her monumental Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, where it was more raw, electric, and angry, as if she had become less polite about the sense of displacement the song portrays. You can hear Jake’s beautiful guitar work and backing vocals here, a moment of beauty birthed in the chaos of that particular transitional period in our development as a band, in our search for an authentic sense of expression.