I know these guys. I went to high school with them. Every line in the song reminded me of them. Got a grill in the backyard with a case of beers. Got a boat that ain’t seen the water in years. All of it. I know these guys. When I went away to college, they went to work framing houses and pouring cement and hauling trash and building out the ever-expanding suburban fringe.

Got a couple of opinions that I hold dear. Got a whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear.

Everything comes with a cost. The new car. The new TV. The pets. The kids, absolutely. But that’s part of the deal. I remember exactly which line clued me in that the song was about them — about all of us:

I don’t know God but I fear his wrath. I’m trying to stay focused on the righteous path.

The song is by the Drive-By Truckers, but the first time I heard it was songwriter Patterson Hood alone, ragged voice over an acoustic guitar in a dank Seattle club. I’d been vaguely aware of the band, I went to the show because a friend promised a beer afterward, and from that night I was hooked.

It wasn’t the quality of the singing. Hood’s voice belongs in a Southern-garage-punk-hillbilly-overgrown-college-rock band, which is basically what the Truckers are. It wasn’t the musicianship, at least not on “The Righteous Path.” The band has brilliant guitarists, but I read somewhere that they wrote this song and recorded it in a matter of hours. In a catalogue rich in indelible riffs, this one is just sort of a torrent of noisy guitars-drums-bass.

I think it’s the unholy mixture of physical stuff (the boat, the new car) and debt and anger and the singer’s obvious love for “a beautiful wife and three tow-headed kids” as well as the fear that at any moment it could all fall apart.

I was a new father at that point, still trying to figure out where home was, and on that damp dreary night out with friends, traffic rushing past outside that dim hole of a bar, I heard a songwriter give voice to an ache I couldn’t name.

And my goodness that line: “I don’t know God but I fear his wrath.” There’s a whole critique of religious formation embedded there. Doug Frank wrote the book-length version, A Gentler God, which is worth checking out. But it hits different when it’s distilled to a single line delivered over furious guitars.

For me, this is end-of-day music, music for lawn mowing before sundown, or washing the last of the dishes, or logging back online after the kids are in bed to wrangle with the family budget. For going along with the illusion of keeping it all together. It’s not contemplative music, except maybe it is.

And it’s nice to imagine something in common with all those folks I’ve lost touch with out in suburbia, even if we’ve built our lives in different places, with different values and different musical tastes. We’ve all got bills to pay. For now, I’m not going stress about what they post, or how they vote. For now, I appreciate all the imperfect psalms, in any genre, forming a soundtrack for the long haul. Thank God for that.