American Canyon Sutra

Album: Tip of the Sphere (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • "American Canyon Sutra" finds Cass McCombs stepping into spoken-word territory as he conjures a symbolic urban landscape with a mixture of fear and disgust. He told Uncut magazine "American Canyon" is not a real place:

    "It's like a city in all of us," McCombs explained. "It's like in William Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night - you have to pass through them to get to a place where there is no thought. If you want to eliminate thoughts, if you want to be free from this corrupted mind, you have to pass through the cities of the red night, but to get there you're going to have to go through hell. You're going to have to see all kinds of horrible humans and be just terrified."

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