For 10 years, I thought Way Out Weather was an “eco” song. Maybe it was the title, or the album artwork. I just thought it was about storms, surviving them, or at least rehearsing the survival, acceptance of some new chaos blooming. Then, when I started writing this and looked up the lyrics, I realized that I was projecting something onto the song that isn’t really there. The real lyrics might be about nothing more than staring at the ocean.

What was it, in Way Out Weather, that allowed me to project my own theme? I certainly had a need. I don’t want to be alone with my huge feelings, watching the destruction with my “planet eyes.” This song has always touched me from the first drop. Tragedy and fear, filtered through stoned awe at the world. The magnitude of the Earth’s shifts and exhalations. Slide guitar, as ever, elegiac. Honky-tonk piano playing out from a sunken ship. The guitar pattern, cyclic, recurring, lapping waves. The drums, like they are an inch away, holding on tight. Maybe this song works because it captures, without cliche, the feelings you get in the presence of the ocean, the miniaturization of self, the expansive communion.

It has always struck me how few songs there are about the most important things happening, things that will probably upend (or end) everybody’s life at once: nuclear war, mass extinction, climate chaos. There are some punk or metal bands with a fully realized “eco-warrior” or “nuclear doomsday” identity, but in all of the other genres of music, there are so few that it seems like there must be some deliberate avoidance, an unspoken pact held up by both artists and listeners. I know people think about this stuff all the time. It’s just not very prominent in their music. Anger and noise are an understandable first stop, but we’ll need a broad palette for all the stages of grief and transformation we’re facing. I have tried to write my own (Garden of Evil, Don’t Call It a Change, Stanislav Arkhipov, The Fate of the Earth), and I’ll probably continue.

I’ve seen Steve Gunn twice, but not playing his own music. The second time was as the frontman for a “The Velvet Underground and Nico” tribute band. They played the album straight through at the Warhol Museum as part of a VU exhibit.

The first time was with Kurt Vile. Steve Gunn was playing guitar in the band. It was a free outdoor summer concert at Hartwood Acres. “Storm’s Comin’. Storm’s Comin’. We’re out.”