My dad and I co-wrote an alternate version of Too Late To Love You's title track in 2021. We were in a dive bar off I-65, with robot bandmates Johnny and Junebug, playing Kentucky Route Zero. The game is mostly reading, but it's marinated in ambient murmurs that occasionally swell into full-on interactive musical numbers. Junebug's show at The Lower Depths is one of these, and the player(s?) gets to pick what lyrics she sings.
I picked the invented duo's full length album (masterminded by Ben Babbitt) for the Spotlight this week because I think its existence is a more interesting premise than a straightforward soundtrack, and to hopefully stop myself from talking about video games for the whole post... we'll see how that goes. And it should go without saying you gotta play Kentucky Route Zero. If my dad could sit through it, literally anybody can. Also, with Gorillaz in the rear view, acquainting with another virtual band this week just feels right.
Not to beat a dead horse (play the game), but Too Late To Love You really does fit into Kentucky Route Zero's established soundscape nicely. The aged synth-pop ballad that serves as the starting point easily expands to fill a 45-minute production, with a few tracks coming close to the title track's spectacle. "Static Between Stations" and "Poison Dream" are two standouts. Listening to this album feels like a reward for exploring the Zero in the same way ending up at Junebug's gig initially did, a gem in a great rough. I stumbled across it somewhere along the breadcrumb trail from WEVP-TV (an in-universe public access station) to the deep depths of Cardboard Computer's mystical YouTube content. The team behind Kentucky Route Zero must have worked so hard to put all this stuff together, and the entire live action recreation of the game's "Un Pueblo De Nada" interlude only has like 7,000 views. I don't remember where the Bandcamp link to this album was, but it was buried. How many people have even heard it?!
The love and creativity poured into this ghostly pseudo-Kentucky is real, and despite how things play out its world feels never-ending. Listen to the melodies in "Too Late To Love You", and "To Love a Red Moon", and "The Stars Drop Away", and likely every other piece of audio from/around this project and tell me they're not all directly building on each other. Finding interlocking treasures as I burrow further into the rabbit hole, I feel like I'm seeing future lost media, which makes me a little sad, cause there's so much I'll never see. But then, think about all that junk! Even if we never get to the bottom of it, we'll be down here exploring forever. That's not a bad fate.
Keep drifting...
Kentucky Route Zero - Original Soundtrack
