I must have looked a little startled. Jones looked over at me, too, and said, “Ah man what, should we be passing out in the middle of takes and shit?”

          “No no no,” I said. “It’s just you guys—if you guys know exactly how long each track is gonna take to record, it seems like you must know exactly what they’re gonna all sound like. Like, exactly what they’re gonna all sound like.”

          Jones and Daniels looked at each other like, “Do we really want to get into this?”

          Jones said, “I mean, what do we play, man? When you get down to it, basically it’s bluegrass, country. Some folk. Right? I mean, we practice a hell of a lot. We’re not the Beatles. The way we use the studio, it’s not an instrument. Once we get in there, we aren’t improvising. It isn’t like, let’s see how the studio changes it.”

          Did Jones mean that the records follow what the group works out in rehearsals so exactly that We Are Arrived and Below 48 in the Lower Forty-Eight are effectively live albums?

          Jones tossed a horseshoe. He said, “Man, there are certain kinds of sounds we like the records to have. But we aren’t our own engineers, so we just let Todd [Lundler] do that sound part of it. ’Cause he knows how we want it. Actually recording it doesn’t take that long.”

          The game wrapped up. They stacked up the horseshoes. Daniels said he was gonna walk and see who all was at the watering hole, did we wanna come?

          “I’m maybe gonna hide out from Sarah,” Jones said.

          Daniels shook his head and muttered “Fuck, man,” and they both laughed.

          Off behind and to the right of Main House was a trailhead that Daniels and I started down. First we came to the spot with the upright piano and the makeshift campfire—I didn’t have to have cut my way blindly through the trees the night before. Then the trail continued its sun-exposed way beside the creek (along this stretch, the trees were set back from the path itself).

          Daniels produced a joint and lit up.

          “It’s amazing how you guys just have this place,” I said.

          He took a drag, held it in, blew the smoke out, and said in dry voice, “Kind of a childhood fantasy, man.” He coughed and passed the joint. “It’s weird how me and Robby had childhood fantasies.”

          I took the joint.

          “Why’s it weird?”

          “’Cause back then, it was already pretty much how you’d want.”

          I took a drag. “What kinds of things did you guys get up to?”

          “Oh man. Just raising hell. Like this one summer – there were these bike trails that started way up in the woods and went almost the whole way to the ocean. So for this one summer, every day we’d take our scooters out there and just tear ass going down.”

          “Sounds fun.”

          “Oh my gosh, yeah.” He beckoned for the joint. “Nothing’s really as fun as that anymore.”

          “So you guys were total outdoors-type kids?”

          He shook his head and took a drag. “Not all the time.” He blew out the smoke. “There’s a reason… we write songs together. ’Cause Robby always had a record player. And we just spent so much time in his bedroom, listening to albums. Just laying on the floor, listening over and over to the same albums.”

          “What’d you guys listen to the most?”

          “All this Southern music, man. I mean, we got into these things when we were like ten. Couple of California kids listening to all this Delta blues and old country singers. And then for a month, we’d get totally into doo-wop. And then we wouldn’t be able to stop listening to Chuck Berry. And if you saw all of what we were both listening to back then, you couldn’t tell we were two different people.”

          “So when you guys write a song today, do you say, like, ‘Let’s do a Jimmie Rodgers song,’ or ‘Let’s do something Chuck Berry—’”

          “No, man, we don’t write like that.”

          “How is it when you write?”

          “Jeez. Just jamming, pretty much. I mean, we’ve been writing together for so long. We just jam on ideas.”

          “So one of you comes to the other with an idea, and you just jam on it until it starts to go somewhere?”

          “That’s pretty much the shape of it.”

          “How long after that till you have a song?”

          He had the joint again; he took a drag and slowly blew out the smoke. “Never calculated that, man.”

          A minute later, Daniels murmured, “I guess all this new stuff is cool too.”

          Then the water widened, the trail, tracing the edge, ran right, and we were upon the swimming hole. Muscular Kylan Lambardi was striding through the water, holding one of the blondes in his arms and periodically letting her splash-fall forward. The other blonde was sunning herself on a far rock, with a compact mirror by her side. Dawkins and Fairweather were shirtlessly basking on a rock a little ways ahead of us; their jeans were rolled up, their calves were arcing, their feet were mixing with the water. There was a case of beer behind them.

          Daniels and I each took beers and pried the caps off. We sat down amid patches of lichen.

          “Whatcha been telling this guy?,” Dawkins said.

          “He’s asking all sorts of questions,” Daniels said. “I think he wants to write an article.”

          A little later, they started singing Hank Williams songs—doing harmonies, going “buh-bum bum bum” at transitions, and slapping their stomachs and splashing their feet for accompaniment.

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