"We Got Into
These Things
When We Were
Like Ten":
The Your Exes on their home turf
by Max Scheinin
What is this thing the Your Exes know, this spiritual impulse that currents through their music? Is it impulse or a knowledge?
Early one morning in July, I sat with Jimmy Daniels, Robby Dawkins and Montgomery Fairweather on the unenclosed front porch of a cabin. Similar structures dotted the grounds around us: the site had been a camping resort until just months earlier, when the band had bought it outright. This getaway is north of Tahoe National Forest, two hundred miles in from the coast. The Exes signed the papers of ownership while on their In the Lower Forty-Eight Tour and promptly escaped, when the tour wrapped, to this, their tucked-away corner of California.
That morning, it was quiet enough to hear a creek running several hundred yards behind us in the woods. Fairweather – the tallest member of the band and, at 34, the oldest – was sitting with his long legs tumbled wide apart. He was talking about road life and the need for a haven.
“I took the incentive on [the purchase],” he told me. “Obviously, nobody didn’t want to have this place. But I pushed it because – I don’t want it to sound like I’m saying I’m old and wise. But this isn’t the first band I’ve done the road thing with. I know – I already know how the road can get. And I knew the best thing for us would be to have a place we could always come to, a place to get far.”
Far—that would have worked as a title for either of the Your Exes’ albums. Their music comes to us as if from across a distance; and it carries a message we recognize, though wouldn’t remember but for the reminding.
The sun was newly risen and light was still filtering through the tree line that we faced. The four of us were all unshaven, wearing work boots and jeans and fleeces and jackets, and sitting in porch chairs arranged in a rough semi-circle. We were having morning cigarettes and setting our coffee mugs down on the boards between sips – except for Fairweather, an expert smoker who often leaves cigarettes dangling from his lower lip and rights them with his upper for a puff, and who therefore could continuously keep his long fingers wrapped around the circumference of his mug. We three others conveyed the cigarettes to and from our mouths by shivering hands.
We were drinking camper’s coffee – grounds floating in the liquid. One smelled pine needles and cigarette smoke and just that sheer cold of the Northern California morning, which may be unscented but is surely inhaled.
Daniels, 24, and Dawkins, 26, started trading off the “Buh-bums” of some doo-wop bass line.
