Every week, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 36-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
This column has me bobbing through a linear history of albums with opportunities to examine connections between songs from different eras. It’s a great luxury. It can feel like both a rewriting of history and seeing how various story lines turned out.
Mecca Normal’s iconic song “I Walk Alone” from the mid-’80s has maintained relevance due to unresolved social issues, but, on a more personal note, I have been walking alone for some years now. By choice and preference. The myriad of red flags snapping in the wind became deafening, obliterating other parts of life that were there for me to explore.
“To Avoid Pain” from The Observer (Kill Rock Stars, 2006) (download):
