The cover appears to have been photographed through a dirty maintenance window, scratched Plexiglas, a bus shelter, or several layers of weathered tape. A street or industrial passage recedes behind a yellow-brown surface so degraded that location has become less important than obstruction. Horizontal rails or pipes cross the lower half. A pale rectangular area holds the hand-drawn title, while tiny printed words near the bottom read MAINT REQ’D. Maintenance required.
That phrase could summarize the entire record. These are not abandoned songs discovered after the machinery stopped working. They are songs produced while life, equipment, attention, employment, family, and the musician himself required continuous upkeep. Some have been completed only in the sense that Nance stopped touching them. Others remain sketches, jokes, alternate paths, private performances, distorted phone documents, and pieces that escaped whatever album was originally supposed to contain them.
“Outtakes” usually implies material rejected from a more authoritative body of work. The finished album receives the front room, while the outtakes are taken around back and released later for collectors who already care. Don’t Take That Way, That Way’s a Mess reverses this hierarchy. The mess is not merely leftover material. It is the actual landscape through which a working artist moves.
David Nance has spent years creating music at several economic and social scales simultaneously. He can release a formal band record through Third Man, play larger stages, back Rosali, tour with trusted Omaha musicians, record full-album covers in a matter of days, issue homemade tapes, and continue accumulating fragments on a telephone. None of these activities cancels the others. The professional release does not render the home recording obsolete, and the home recording does not need to pretend it was secretly aiming for professional finish.
This is the difference between prolificacy as branding and prolificacy as daily practice. A branded prolific artist is presented as an endless fountain whose imagination produces complete objects faster than ordinary people can consume them. A working musician makes things because making things has become part of how time is survived. Some results receive budgets, schedules, publicity, and carefully assembled bands. Others happen after everyone else has gone to sleep.
Nance has said that fatherhood made him more deliberate about when he writes, often working quietly late at night because employment and family occupy most of the day. That circumstance is audible here not as domestic complaint but as form. The telephone becomes recorder because it is already within reach. Songs become brief because brief time exists. Distortion remains because correcting it would require another window in the schedule. The archive grows around life rather than demanding that life vacate the premises.
The cover’s photographed barrier is therefore not just attractive grime. It establishes the position from which the record sees. We do not receive an unobstructed master image. We look outward through damage, reflection, dirt, compression, and whatever happened to stand between the lens and the street. The obstruction becomes part of the street because it cannot be removed from our experience of looking.
Digital clipping performs the same operation upon sound. In analog recording, overload may round, saturate, and add harmonics in ways listeners have learned to describe as warm. Digital overload reaches a ceiling and cuts off the waveform. Information does not gently bend; it collides with a limit. The resulting crackle and hard-edged breakup are commonly treated as errors to be prevented.
Nance gives the error affection. “Loving amounts of digital clipping” is funny, but the adjective matters. The damage is not merely tolerated as evidence of authenticity. It becomes part of the emotional contact between musician and recording. The phone tries to contain a guitar, voice, room, or speaker louder than its small microphone can process. Its failure measures the force of what entered.
“Get Used to the Water” lasts fifty-two seconds, barely enough time to identify the water before adaptation is demanded. The phrase can be encouragement offered to someone learning to swim, cruelty directed at someone already drowning, or the practical wisdom of a body that cannot wait for conditions to become comfortable.
Getting used to the water differs from making the water warm. The environment remains what it is; the person changes. This can be resilience, resignation, training, or the gradual acceptance of something that should never have become normal. A working life contains all four. The alarm rings, bills recur, bodies age, children need care, shifts consume daylight, and the artist learns to enter creative water at whatever temperature remains.
The song’s tiny duration keeps it from becoming inspirational doctrine. Nance does not stand on shore explaining adaptation. The record pushes us in and moves immediately to the next situation.
“I Stood Alone in the Grocery Store” enlarges one of modern life’s most ordinary interiors until it becomes existential. Grocery stores are crowded with evidence of human dependency while encouraging the illusion of private choice. Food has been planted, raised, killed, harvested, processed, packaged, priced, shipped, stocked, refrigerated, and advertised by people who remain invisible at the moment of purchase. The shopper stands alone among the coordinated labor of thousands.
To stand alone there can mean literal late-night isolation, emotional disconnection inside a crowd, indecision before abundance, financial calculation, or the strange stillness that sometimes arrives beneath fluorescent light. The grocery store promises nourishment but organizes it through money. Hunger enters as biology and is converted into comparison among brands.
Nance’s deep-fried Americana is perfect for this location. Country music has traditionally carried farms, hunger, work, family tables, drinking, loneliness, and rural distance. Here those materials arrive at the retail endpoint, where agriculture has become barcodes and refrigeration. Twang remains, but it is heard through a phone microphone inside the age of self-checkout.
The title is also funny because it grants heroic solitude to an unheroic place. The lone figure in traditional American imagery stands on a mountain, highway, range, battlefield, stage, or prairie. Nance stands near cereal, frozen pizza, and seasonal promotions. This reduction does not destroy grandeur. It locates grandeur where most lives actually occur.
“If I’d Stop, I’d Stop Right Now” constructs a sentence that defeats its own intention. Stopping is proposed conditionally, then made immediate, yet the song continues for more than three minutes. The speaker can imagine cessation while remaining unable or unwilling to enact it.
This is the grammar of compulsion, labor, addiction, artistic practice, worry, and ordinary momentum. People often continue not because they have chosen a destination but because stopping would create a silence in which the reason for continuing must finally be examined. Motion protects itself.
For a prolific musician, stopping has another ambiguity. Does it mean ending a song, quitting touring, abandoning the next recording, putting away the guitar, or refusing to convert every available feeling into material? Making music can be labor, refuge, identity, income, therapy, social life, and private compulsion at once. There may be no single activity to stop.
The record does not romanticize this entirely. Outtakes are evidence of work that exceeded formal demand. Nobody required sixteen phone recordings. They exist because the impulse continued after a conventional career strategy might have advised concentration, scarcity, and careful management of the catalog.
“Paint the Bells White” opens the collection’s most extended space and introduces another person’s language directly into Nance’s private recording world. The title comes from Mychal Marasco’s poem, making the track an act of borrowing that is acknowledged as loving rather than hidden beneath claims of influence.
Painting bells white is a strange labor. A bell exists to sound, while paint alters its visible surface and potentially its vibration. White can suggest purity, burial, primer, surrender, institutional walls, wedding decoration, snow, or the attempt to conceal weathered metal. The object designed to announce something has been cosmetically transformed before it speaks again.
A bell also converts impact into public time. It calls people to worship, warns of danger, marks death, announces celebration, regulates work, and tells a community that an event has occurred. Painting it does not change the event, but it changes how the instrument appears while announcing it.
Nance’s version places poetry inside clipping and homemade production, allowing literary language to pass through a technology associated with quick documentation rather than permanence. The result does not elevate the phone recording into respectable art. It brings the poem down into the room where cables, borrowed microphones, domestic schedules, and overloaded inputs already live.
“Chamba” carries a word whose meaning shifts according to language and place. It can suggest work, employment, or a job in Mexican and Central American usage; elsewhere it may carry other names and associations. On an album by a musician who explicitly treats music as a part-time job, the possible connection to labor feels especially alive.
Work is everywhere in these recordings, even when no song directly describes a workplace. Instruments must be picked up. Levels must be guessed. Files must be named. Takes must be stored, found, judged, sequenced, uploaded, dubbed onto cassette, packaged, and mailed. DIY culture can hide this labor beneath romance because the worker and artist are the same person.
Calling home recording freedom is accurate but incomplete. Removing institutional gatekeepers means inheriting their tasks. The musician becomes engineer, archivist, label, manufacturing department, sales clerk, publicity office, shipping station, and technical support. Independence is not the disappearance of work. It is work changing ownership.
“Good Posture, Bad Vocabulary” lasts thirty-two seconds and features Murray Nance, allowing the artist’s child to enter the collection as voice rather than subject. The title pairs physical correctness with linguistic failure. Sit straight, stand properly, hold the body according to instruction, but let language remain unruly.
Children encounter these pressures early. Adults correct posture, pronunciation, grammar, manners, volume, timing, and acceptable words while children are still discovering that the voice can alter a room. Murray’s appearance interrupts the solitary mythology surrounding the one-man recording. The house contains another consciousness, another vocabulary, and another possible musician who has not yet been sorted into professional categories.
The cameo is brief enough to preserve play. It does not announce a family dynasty or ask a child to carry symbolic emotional weight for the album. A voice enters, leaves, and remains on the tape because the recording process was porous enough to admit actual life.
“Pure Evil #9” returns to a title already central to Nance’s earlier work, but the number prevents the song from becoming a definitive reprise. Evil has undergone at least nine versions, attempts, recordings, mixtures, or manifestations. The phrase sounds like a perfume, chemical formula, train, motel room, or experimental batch.
Numbering a song this way exposes the false finality of recorded versions. Listeners often treat the released master as the song itself, but musicians know that a song can possess demo form, rehearsal form, live form, abandoned arrangement, alternate lyric, accidental take, and private late-night mutation. The numbered version acknowledges that identity has become serial.
Pure evil is an absolute moral category; #9 is inventory language. Put together, they turn metaphysical darkness into something stored on a shelf. This is funny, but also accurate to the way culture manages horror. Even evil becomes a product variant, sequel, file, category, and repeatable aesthetic.
The earlier Pure Evil belonged to Nance’s emergence as a formidable figure in damaged American rock. This later iteration makes the phrase coexist with grocery stores, parenthood, work, phones, and aging. Evil has not vanished, but it must now operate within a much busier calendar.
“No Password” makes access impossible through the absence of the thing required to gain it. The phrase may mean the system has been left open, the password has been forgotten, no password was ever created, or the person asking for entrance has been denied the category through which entrance could be authorized.
Passwords turn memory into infrastructure. Work, money, communication, music, photographs, identity, health, and private history become dependent upon strings of characters that must be remembered while remaining difficult for others to guess. Forgetting one can temporarily make a person a stranger to his own possessions.
A phone-recorded archive lives precariously inside this system. Songs may be abundant but remain vulnerable to broken devices, lost accounts, failed backups, incompatible formats, and forgotten organization. The most immediate recording tool can also become a sealed box. “No Password” therefore sounds like freedom and catastrophe at once.
“Generation Jump Scare” gives cultural inheritance the structure of a horror-film edit. A jump scare works by manipulating attention and timing. The viewer looks toward one area, silence creates false safety, and an image or sound suddenly enters from another direction. Its force comes partly from the body responding before interpretation can intervene.
Generations experience one another this way. Parents look at children and suddenly see a future for which they feel unprepared. Children look at parents and unexpectedly recognize age, fragility, or resemblance. Cultural habits that seemed permanent vanish; older damage reappears in new clothing; technology changes the rules before anyone has completed learning the previous set.
The title may also describe the emotional whiplash of raising a child while losing family members and watching one’s own position shift within the generational chain. Nance returned to Omaha partly after the death of his younger sister Angel, wanting proximity to the family that remained. Fatherhood and grief therefore occupy neighboring rooms even when the songs do not explain that relationship directly.
A jump scare is brief, but its aftershock reorganizes the scene. “Generation Jump Scare” lasts under two minutes, respecting the title’s suddenness while allowing the nervous system just enough time to understand that something irreversible entered.
“From the Foot of a Mountain” rejects the heroic viewpoint from the summit. The singer is not above the landscape surveying conquered distance. He stands at the bottom, where the mountain is largest and the route least abstract.
American rock has often placed musicians at symbolic peaks, alone with guitar and revelation. Nance’s working practice belongs closer to the foot. Records are built from errands, jobs, rehearsals, family time, borrowed gear, local collaborators, small labels, tours of uneven scale, and rooms where no photographer is present.
The foot of a mountain is not failure. It is the point where climbing becomes material rather than imagined. From below, one can see weight, weather, rock, routes, and the bodily cost of ascent. One may also decide that climbing is not the only meaningful relationship with a mountain.
This is important for an artist whose career has repeatedly brushed against wider recognition without converting him into a conventional star. Third Man can release a record; five thousand people can watch an opening set; critics can describe him as a guitar hero; then he returns home and records clipped songs on a phone. The mountain remains, but so does the life at its base.
“Divider” names an object or person that creates separation. A highway divider prevents collision while making crossing difficult. A room divider creates temporary privacy without becoming a wall. Arithmetic division distributes one quantity into smaller parts. Political dividers turn difference into power.
Recording also divides. A microphone separates one event from the surrounding continuity by deciding what enters the file. Editing divides the useful portion from the discarded portion. An album divides official songs from outtakes. A track marker divides continuous listening into named units.
This compilation weakens those divisions. The outtake becomes released work. The phone becomes studio. Family enters performance. Poetry enters rock song. Old composition becomes numbered variant. Finished and unfinished stop behaving like moral opposites.
The title track lasts only fifty-one seconds, but its sentence becomes the album’s governing instruction: “Don’t take that way, that way’s a mess.” It sounds like advice given by someone familiar with a road, hallway, route through a building, career choice, emotional subject, or portion of life that has become difficult to cross.
The first “way” refers to direction. The second becomes condition. A route is a mess, but the mess may also be the evidence that people have already passed through it carrying work, damage, tools, boxes, weather, children, cables, and unfinished repairs.
The advice is protective, yet the album proves that Nance took that way. He spent four years gathering its debris. The compilation is a report sent from inside the route everyone was advised to avoid.
The phrase also describes how musicians talk to one another while loading equipment, finding venues, surviving tours, and navigating industries built from partial information. Don’t take that highway. Don’t use that promoter. Don’t sign that agreement. Don’t load through that door. Don’t put the microphone there. Don’t take that way. It’s a mess.
Working knowledge often arrives in these compressed warnings. The full explanation would take too long, and the person receiving it may be carrying an amplifier.
“That Look Only Means One Thing” turns facial expression into a code whose interpretation is presented as certain. Yet looks rarely mean only one thing. Desire can resemble anger, exhaustion can resemble contempt, fear can resemble indifference, and recognition can resemble accusation.
The title sounds like the confident sentence spoken immediately before a misunderstanding. Human beings are desperate to read one another accurately because social life depends upon prediction. We scan eyes, mouths, posture, silence, timing, and small changes in tone, then build stories from evidence too incomplete to support certainty.
A phone recording similarly invites interpretation from limited information. Clipping obscures detail. Rooms are unidentified. Dates span four years. Outtakes arrive without the contextual explanation that a formal album campaign might provide. The listener sees a look and decides what it means.
Nance’s voice helps sustain this uncertainty. It carries wear, humor, twang, irritation, affection, and a certain Midwestern refusal to polish every feeling into one approved emotional category. He can sound sincere and as though he is quietly laughing at the form sincerity has taken.
“Makin’ a Scene With T” turns trouble into collaboration. To make a scene can mean causing embarrassment in public, creating a cultural environment, staging an image, or constructing a piece of art. The letter T may identify a person whose full name belongs to private life, leaving the listener with only the shape of companionship.
Scenes are made by people who continue showing up. Omaha’s musical life survives not because one artist becomes nationally important enough to represent it, but because musicians lend microphones, share rhythm sections, record one another, tour together, attend shows, form new configurations, and remain available for the next idea.
Nance’s world includes James Schroeder, Kevin Donahue, Sam Lipsett, Dereck Higgins, Pearl LoveJoy Boyd, Simon Joyner, Rosali, and many others. This outtakes collection is primarily solitary, but solitude is supported by a local social structure. Even the borrowed cymbal carries another musician into the room.
The title’s “with” matters more than the scene. Cultural history often remembers front people and album names while losing the practical network that made continued creation possible. A scene is not merely a style shared by several bands. It is a web of favors, rooms, rides, equipment, patience, and people willing to listen before importance has been established.
“I’m Going Where They Don’t Know My Name” imagines anonymity as destination. Musicians are usually expected to desire recognition, but recognition can become another demand. Once a name accumulates expectations, every new work is compared with what the name has previously promised.
Going somewhere unknown offers relief from biography. The person can enter a room without being asked about a record, band, review, influence, tour, or earlier self. Anonymity is not failure there. It is a temporary return to unassigned existence.
The line has deeper working-class resonance too. People travel for jobs, family, rent, survival, escape, and the possibility that another place will not contain the same social limits. Yet arriving where nobody knows the name also means losing credit, history, reputation, and the assistance familiarity can provide.
For Nance, the fantasy may be impossible. He carries the name inside the songs, and the voice makes recognition available even when production tries to obscure it. But the outtake offers a partial disguise. It is less publicly armored than a formal studio track, closer to sound made before the outside world has decided what to call it.
“Wish I Could Get High (Like I Used To)” closes the collection with longing for an experience whose chemistry, context, age, body, and meaning have changed. The phrase is not simply a wish for intoxication. It is a wish to recover the person for whom intoxication once worked in a particular way.
“You used to” is one of aging’s most heavily populated territories. The same drink, drug, song, town, friendship, drive, late night, or guitar sound cannot reproduce its earlier effect because the receiver has changed. Tolerance may be chemical, but it is also biographical. Experience teaches the mind what is coming, and anticipation removes some of discovery’s force.
The desire to get high as before may therefore be a desire to become unknowing again. Youth could enter states without carrying the full archive of consequences, grief, obligations, and previous attempts. The adult body cannot simply subtract that knowledge.
Music offers an imperfect version of the same wish. A listener returns to an old record hoping for the first impact, but hears it through every subsequent year. A musician reaches for a riff, distortion, or recording method associated with earlier freedom and discovers that technique has become too knowledgeable to reproduce innocence.
Nance’s phone recordings solve this problem accidentally. The device introduces enough unpredictability and technical failure to make the artist encounter his own music from a less controlled position. Digital clipping becomes a cheap chemical alteration. Familiar rock forms return warped, overexposed, and capable of producing surprise.
The closing track is the longest after “Paint the Bells White,” giving the wish room to persist after the other fragments have hurried past. It ends the record not with recovery but with recognition that the old condition cannot be ordered on demand.
That recognition need not be defeat. The compilation itself demonstrates another kind of high: finding that scraps recorded across four years can form a world once placed beside one another. The artist may no longer enter music exactly as he once did, but the practice remains capable of generating unforeseen connections.
Western Records is essential to that practice. The name sounds grand enough to belong to an old regional label issuing country singles from an office above a hardware store, but Nance uses it as a handmade outlet for cassettes, CDRs, full-album cover projects, private experiments, and whatever else formal release systems would force to wait.
A self-run label allows whim to become schedule. This does not eliminate judgment. It relocates judgment to the person closest to the work. Nance can decide that clipped phone recordings, a thirty-two-second child vocal, a ninth version of “Pure Evil,” and sixteen tracks whose official description cannot decide whether fourteen or fifteen are unreleased deserve a physical object.
That uncertainty is delightful. A normal press release would settle the arithmetic before publication. Nance leaves “14 (maybe 15?)” as though counting the tunes accurately would misunderstand why they are being released. The catalog exists, but the cataloger is still inside the pile.
The home-dubbed cassette completes the idea. Cassette duplication requires time to pass in physical proportion to the music unless specialized equipment accelerates it. Each copy turns while forty-one minutes of sound are transferred onto magnetic tape. The maker cannot pretend the object arrived instantly from a distant plant.
“Home-dubbed with love” can sound sentimental until one imagines the repeated labor. Load cassette. Record. Monitor. Flip or change. Label. Package. Repeat. Love is not an abstract glow surrounding the product. It is the willingness to perform a dull operation again because another person wants the music.
This is where the user’s description of Nance as a real working musician becomes especially accurate. The romance of rock usually hides maintenance. Guitars require strings, tubes, batteries, repair, transport, storage, and practice. Bands require schedules and relationships. Tours require routes, fuel, food, sleep, and risk. Releases require files, artwork, emails, manufacturing, payment, and postage. Families require presence that cannot be delegated to an artistic persona.
Don’t Take That Way, That Way’s a Mess does not rise above this maintenance. It turns maintenance into its recording environment. The songs were not waiting in a pure imaginative realm for life to stop interfering. They were made through the available openings in life.
The tiny MAINT REQ’D notice on the cover is therefore the record’s secret label. It applies to the street, window, building, music industry, recording device, body, memory, family schedule, and country tradition being carried through Nance’s distorted Americana. Everything needs attention. Nothing stays fixed because someone declared it finished.
The image remains beautiful precisely because nobody cleaned the viewing surface. Scratches become lines, grime becomes grain, and the unremarkable route beyond the glass becomes a half-lost landscape. The title is written across the obstruction rather than behind it, suggesting that the warning was produced by the same damage it describes.
Do not take that way.
That way is a mess.
But it is also where the songs are.
