PREMIERE // Adam Ostrar – Kansas City

Post by Misha

Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about the people I thought I understood, before time revealed them to be complicated at best, frightening at their worst. I think about a man who lived down a dirt road from me for most of my young life. When I was 11 he used to pay me twenty dollars a day to pull knapweed out of the hillside where his longhorn cattle grazed. Every four years he’d put up a hand-painted billboard in his hayfield along the highway proclaiming loudly, “RON PAUL: THE ONLY CHOICE FOR PRESIDENT.”

Then, when I was 12 or so, we were driving to school one day and in that same field, next to the Ron Paul sign, there was a new addition: two dolls, one red and one green, hanging in effigy from a freshly erected, rough hewn double gallows.

It was terrifying.

I remember my parents trying wearily to explain a century’s worth of labor history and environmental activism and attempting unsuccessfully to put our neighbor’s hatred within a historical context that would make sense to a 12 year old. Eventually, my father walked down the road and somehow talked him into taking down the gallows. I’m not entirely sure how.

Sometimes I think about that memory and in all my adult maturity and enlightenment I can only come up with fear and anger. But sometimes I think what I crave today, even more than (or at least as much as) “winning” is to understand the stories that shaped the people I fear.

Adam Ostrar’s sophomore album, The Worried Coat, is a collection of twelve stories about “otherness, self-identity, and our personal relationships with anxiety. How we often betray our best intentions through willful ignorance.” Though told through the disparate voices of our times, the album comes from the mind of a father desperate to understand the world he is leaving to his children, desperate to find sparks of humanity wherever they hide.

The first single, ‘Kansas City’, is told in the voice of “Joe the Plumber looking backwards on his false nostalgia.” It is soft and introspective, a small moment of clarity which, whether real or imagined, is healing.

The Worried Coat will be out April 5th via Austin-based Super Secret Records. Buy Kansas City here.