Key West

Album: The Roads Don't Lead Home, The Roads Lead Everywhere (2010)
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Songfacts®:

  • Chris Clavin is a singer/guitarist based out of Bloomington, Indiana and the founder of Plan-It-X records, an independent label promoting DIY music and aesthetics since 1994. Chris has released a number of solo albums under his name as well as under the moniker Captain Chaos. Bands he has been involved with include Imperial Can, Ghost Mice, Disarm and Operation: Cliff Clavin. On the process of writing, recording and playing music, Chris told us it is rooted in "a need to talk to people... playing music is a way to communicate."
  • "Key West," a standout song from Chris Clavin's release The Roads Don't Lead Home, The Roads Lead Everywhere, in typical fashion, tells a story. The album is about travels, and as Chris told Songfacts, "All my songs are true."

    This track tells about a particularly fortuitous meeting in the far southern reaches of Florida, where a friend, the central figure of the story, goes to spend Christmas alone in "the beach bum haven of the sixties," but was disappointed to find that that Key West was long gone. After wandering town and stopping for a bagel, the friend meets some guys who've ridden their bikes to Key West from Gainesville. After traversing the long roads of Florida on bike with these new found friends, the person in the song calls Chris to say one of these guys is in a band called This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, "we should do a record for them." And so a partnership was created between Plan-It-X, Chris's record label, and This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, a Gainesville punk band who has released several notable albums through Plan-It-X. In addition, one of the members of This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, Teddy Helmick, would later manage Plan-It-X South, a branch of the main label.

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