An Arizona road trip inspires a Palmyra song that captures the state’s beauty — and mystery

SAM DINGMAN: Earlier this year, I was out for a jog in my neighborhood. One of my favorite things about jogging in Phoenix is that you’ll be running along this quiet suburban street — and then you look up, and you can see the mountains looming in the distance. I like it because it reminds me how strange it is that we’ve found a way to put a busy modern city in this arid, ancient place.

On this particular night, I was listening to a new album I’d heard about, by this band called Palmyra. And right around twilight, as the sky was taking on that uncanny purple-orange sizzle, the third song on this album almost stopped me in my tracks.

[CLIP OF PALMYRA'S "ARIZONA"]

PALMYRA: I was in a haze in Arizona. Come back won’t it, come back? Hours, felt like days, And I was happy for the first time in a while.

DINGMAN: There was something about that feeling — being happy for the first time in a while — that felt instantly familiar to me. But on top of that, there was something about the association of that feeling with this place — with Arizona. I thought, “I’ve never heard this song before, but I’ve felt what they’re singing about.”

TEDDY CHIPOURIS: Arizona is a tune that I wrote about a road trip that I took out in the Southwest in 2020.

DINGMAN: That’s Teddy Chipouris, one of the members of Palmyra.

CHIPOURIS: It was just a strange time.

DINGMAN: As Teddy’s bandmate, Manoa Bell, put it:

MANOA BELL: I think that the song really captures the desert in a way that it can be both comforting and ominous simultaneously.

DINGMAN: I think the reason the song Arizona felt so true to my experience of the state of Arizona is that I had a really similar experience to Teddy’s. Because during the pandemic, long before I worked at KJZZ, when I was still living in New York, my wife, Adrien, and I took a road trip of our own to Arizona. And, after I talked to the Palmyra guys, I called her up to reminisce about it.

ADRIEN BEHN: Can you hear the subway?

DINGMAN: Adrien was back in New York. It was late there, and she’d had a long day.

BEHN: I wanna lie down.

DINGMAN: Once she got comfortable, I asked if she remembered why we chose Arizona as our road trip destination.

BEHN: The experience I was hoping to have on that trip was I wanted to scream in the desert. Because the desert makes me uncomfortable. It makes me feel bleak — and it makes me feel like, what are we doing here? That is what I wanted to feel, because we were at such an insanely bleak moment in history. And I wanted to stand in the middle of the desert and kind of have it, like, swallow me whole emotionally. It doesn’t make sense.

DINGMAN: It does make sense! Like you wanted the outside to match what you were feeling inside.

BEHN: Yeah.

DINGMAN: I can still remember the night we pulled my blue Subaru Crosstrek up to the small ranch house we’d rented. It was way up in the northwest corner of the state — the unincorporated community of Cane Beds, Arizona, population 466. The house was at the end of an unpaved red dirt road. And it was surrounded by gnarled scrub brush for miles in every direction. And that was it.

BEHN: It was you and me, man. That’s for sure.

DINGMAN: Do you remember when we got to the grocery store and there was literally a tumbleweed?

BEHN: It was the biggest tumbleweed I’ve ever seen. It was like literally up to Bluebaru’s wheel!

DINGMAN: Bluebaru is what Adrien calls the blue Subaru. And for a couple of New Yorkers, who, at that point, hadn’t spent much time out west, the tumbleweed felt like a sign that we had arrived in scream country.

BEHN: It was amazing!

[CLIP FROM PALMYRA'S "ARIZONA"]

DINGMAN: A few months after that twilight jog, I read an article about the phenomenon of so-called “corporate refugees” — burned-out millennials who decide to pivot from their desk jobs by taking over small family businesses. The story featured a couple from the Valley named Steve and Kristin Smith — the now-former owners of Die Cleaning Equipment. Steve and Kristin had recently sold their company to a pair of these restless millennials. And they were thrilled about it — because they wanted to spend more time taking road trips.

KRISTIN SMITH: Steve asked me what we should do when we retire — what’s our retirement plan? And I said, I think we should get an Airstream, and see all the national parks!

DINGMAN: So they did. A 27-foot Airstream International, to be exact.

STEVE SMITH: It has a bedroom in the front, with large panoramic windows that go all the way around. And then the dining area is in the back, and it has panoramic windows also. And so that’s really nice, because when you back up to a beautiful river or a mountain, it’s right outside your door, and you’re looking at it while you’re eating your breakfast or dinner or whatever.

DINGMAN: Since they got the Airstream, Steve and Kristin have traveled coast to coast, north to south, sometimes spending up to five months on the road.

STEVE SMITH: Crater Lake, Lassen, Sequoia.

KRISTIN SMITH: King’s Canyon.

STEVE SMITH: King’s Canyon. We stopped at Acadia National Park for, I dunno, five, six days. And then went up in to the Canadian Maritimes, and went up through New Brunswick.

KRISTIN SMITH: Nova Scotia.

STEVE SMITH: Cape Breton Island … the music up at Cape Breton Island is — it’s just so much fun.

KRISTIN SMITH: In the parish hall, they have these every night … you come and listen to music, and in the middle, they have oatmeal cakes for dessert, and then you listen to the music again, people tell stories and play music.

DINGMAN: Now, I don’t even know if I would’ve noticed Steve and Kristin’s story if it hadn’t been for that Palmyra song, which reminded me of Adrien and I’s first road trip. But hearing about their adventures, I started getting the urge to get back out there. So I told Adrien about it.

DINGMAN: I talked to this couple that after they retired, they got an Airstream, and that’s their retirement plan, is to drive around all over the country, and wake up in lots of different places. And I had never thought at all about what I want my retirement to look like.

BEHN: Are you soft-launching this to me now?

DINGMAN: Maybe? What do you think?

BEHN: In this moment I’m not fully enticed. [LAUGHS]

DINGMAN: It’s not that she doesn’t want to go on more road trips, Adrien told me. It’s that in the haze of the pandemic, escaping the present felt like the only way to stay sane. And for a little while anyway, she wants to focus on being in the present. At least — for now.

BEHN: But I also know that I always wanna explore. I don’t know what shape it’s gonna take then, and I wanna go on every adventure with you.

DINGMAN: And that made me think of something Steve Smith told me.

STEVE SMITH: Let’s make the most of our travels and see what we can see.