If I were making a soundtrack for the end of the world, this is one of the first songs that I’d put on it. With its sprawling, intense guitar jams and characteristic slowed-down, raggedly heartfelt vocals, “Cowgirl In The Sand” has a focus and stature that belies its apparent looseness. I’m always struck by the way it slows down at precisely the moment when you expect it to speed up (several times) and the sense of journeying — in which the journey itself rather than the destination is really where it’s all at — which the song offers and engenders. So when I listen to the song, I think of endings, of freeway driving with the windows down and the wind rushing all around, of summers and the long falls into and out of them, and of something beyond all of those — something which is, I suppose, the prerogative of music to invoke without ever naming, but we know it’s there still.
