I reviewed … “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Pitchfork?

For the 250th anniversary of this messy country, I went very long on a track Pitchfork has never reviewed—that is, the national anthem. Here’s a story about living in a van in America.

Welcome to the 22nd edition of Out & Back, my newsletter about music and whatever else. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I’d be honored if you did. And please share, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m working on three (!) big profiles this week, so I’ll be fast here. I reviewed Mildred’s great album, Fenceline, for Pitchfork. And, as you will see below, I also reviewed “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Pitchfork. See you soon, and thanks for reading!

The day that my wife, Tina, turned 31, we went to look at vans. Maybe we should live in one?

That was March 2, 2017. Donald Trump had been president for about six weeks, and that was but one of the things that made us want to change our lives as middle-class Americans with 9–5 jobs in a mid-sized city. We were both deeply over those jobs. Tina was stuck in a gender-pay-gap dispute with the piddly ad agency where she worked, and I had quit my longtime newspaper post to help launch a Raleigh website, which proved one of the lamest experiences of my life. We’d gone to Arizona in February and dipped down far enough below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon to see the Colorado River, to be wowed by it. On the way back to Phoenix that night, we pulled our rental car over and stood in silence on the side of the road, staring at a night sky so big and bright Tina cried. We’d never seen stars like that, never even imagined it possible.

August 11, 2017—the first time Tina and I crossed into Colorado, where we now live.

It all felt like an invitation to get out of where we’d been for our entire adult lives, to do something wildly different. Five years earlier, we’d put every cent we’d ever saved into a mortgage, buying the house we assumed we’d live in for the rest of our lives. A month after Tina turned 31, it was on the market. As people toured the house into which we’d poured so much energy and love, we drove our new van—a Winnebago RV, tucked inside a Sprinter, really—to a lake and camped. The day the house closed, we had resolved, we would move into the van, living off the sale of the house and the various fats of the land for as long as we wanted. Multiple family members said we were about to ruin our lives. Multiple friends asked, “But you’re coming back, right?” My answer, almost immediately, became no.

After Trump’s first election, Tina and I had the same daydreaming conversation a lot of you probably had: Should we move somewhere else? Should we emigrate to Canada? I’d long been obsessed with the idea of moving to Yellowknife, precisely because its name is Yellowknife, and we went so far as to look online at real estate there. Instead of getting out of the United States, though, we went deeper into it, deeper than I’d ever considered—over the next 18 months, 100,000 miles in 49 states, the two of us and two cats and a dog and a map we bought at a Barnes & Noble in Norfolk and laminated and into which we stuck thumbtacks of all the places we’d been. The map filled up fast; if you shined a light through it now, it would probably look like the Arizona sky.

Near Devil’s Tower, the first national monument.

I could and maybe should someday fill pages and pages with the things we experienced and witnessed—being chased by a grizzly bear in the Tetons, going to a Victrola museum in Delaware, hunting for our stolen bikes in The Mission, sleeping in a brewery in Chicago for three days, riding in our van across the Green River in Kentucky on a one-car ferry built for a sedan, hiking our way into Gates of the Arctic National Park with little more than a lot of gumption, doing long runs in the rain in the Redwoods and in the snow in the Great Basin and in the summer heat in the Mojave, getting speeding tickets in Georgia and New York, almost blowing the radiator in Death Valley, summiting our first mountains, seeing Pharoah Sanders in a small club in Minneapolis, hiking Rim to Rim to Rim in the Grand Canyon, trying to go to the military base where Tina was born only to have a few automatic weapons aimed at the van, being surrounded by bison at night in North Dakota and then South Dakota and then wherever we could find my favorite mammal, meeting Shaquille O’Neal on our final full day in the van at Third Man Records in Nashville. I guess this list is only about 500 or so items long, since that’s how many days we spent in the van. It feels, to me, infinite.

One of my favorite van photos of Tina, eating cereal in John Day Fossil Beds National Monument.

We also went to Yellowknife and saw the Northern Lights there for the first time during a magical night. But we also turned around there, heading back south and west—to Alaska, to the United States. When we’d left Raleigh, we were obviously pretty low on the idea and actuality of the United States, an increasingly stupid place then insisting on Muslim bans and bathroom bills and assaults on women’s rights and voting rights and really assaults on the rights of pretty much everyone who doesn’t look like me. That feeling has only intensified in the last decade. If you wanted it darker, well, you fucking got it.

But spending three years in that van (we got back in it for a spell from 2022 to 2023) forever affirmed the possibility of this place to me, and that has never wavered, even though it has dimmed. It is a big, beautiful, warped, and wild expanse, full of landscapes and cities and communities that constantly twisted my perception of what this country actually was and is and can be. One of the United States’ real governance problems is its size, how diverse its locations and situations are; that is also a boon, because, even after 250 years, it remains so undefined and heterodox. There’s so much to figure out but also so much space in which to do it. Since we moved into the van, I’ve walked more than 12,000 miles across the country, but I’ve never understood the sweep and complexity and tragedy and perseverance of the United States better than when we lived in the van. We met a woman in Selma one day who walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday. She laughed at Trump like she was swatting away a housefly. If she could do that, I reckoned, so could we.

Van in Monument Valley.

Anyway, when my editor and friend Jeremy Larson asked me if I wanted to review “The Star-Spangled Banner” for Pitchfork for July 4, 2026, I said yes before I could even get out of bed. The result is a 3,000-word descent into the history of the song, from the origins of the melody in a British social club to the three days Francis Scott Key spent in Baltimore Harbor under British captivity to his deep and maddening hypocrisy as a lawyer, citizen, and person. I wrote about Whitney Houston and the Confederate flag and Aretha Franklin and the Detroit Lions and José Feliciano and Jimi Hendrix and the San Antonio Spurs. I didn’t write about anything I’ve mentioned above, but I also think I wrote about all of it, because what I was writing about really was the possibility of a country I’ve worked to experience so intimately—a place run past and present by absolutely incorrigible and evil idiots but a place that I still hope can get its act together, even if I believe that a little or a lot less every single day.