Palaxy Tracks Wilderness

Brandon Durham is from Cedar Park, TX, a place of half-lit woods and lonely roads. When he was a child, he would fantasize about being a victim in a horror film. As a teenager, he played metal guitar. For an audition while under strict curfew, he slipped riffs out his bedroom window for a band assembled outside. (He was in!) The band was called Fury in Motion. As a young man, he moved to Austin, TX, and started his own group, Palaxy Tracks. They released three albums, including the shimmering and perfect Cedarland (Peek-A-Boo, 2003). They were a beloved part of the scene that fostered Spoon, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and The Octopus Project. Durham moved to Chicago for a while to work sound for the legendary shitty venue Beat Kitchen. He moved back to Austin in 2006 to play guitar for The Octopus Project, and there he met the man that he would later marry. Then, like many of his cohorts, his career took off and he put the down the guitar. Durham is now not quite 43, the year he thought a man “gets handsome.” He and his husband live in a New York City apartment with an 80-pound dog and two cats. He works for the typographers Hoefler & Co. Things are good. Then, after ten years, he picks up a guitar again, and songs come out... A song about memories of a home invasion (“Slow Dancing”). A song about an affair with a married man (“Non-Fiction”). A song about The Octopus Project (“Die Young”). A song about ghosts rising from the floor and young families hanging by their necks from trees (“The Afterlives”). A song about a cat named Thurston (“Weird Weather”). Songs about childhood, secrets and desire. Songs of the sounds made in the wilderness. We are the animals there.