What Goes Most With Your Toast: Celebrating Tasty Jams -- Vol. 2 -- "Colonel Birkenstock Misses His Stop"
Vol. 2
“Colonel Birkenstock Misses His Stop”
“Colonel Birkenstock Misses His Stop” represents, in many ways, the classic IPJ lineup at the peak of their songwriting collaborations. With substantial contributions from all five members of the band — Rodgers, Schuster, Lindley, Gilbraith, DePuy — “Misses His Stop” is chronologically the first song in IPJ’s Colonel Suite, and tells the story of how a miniature French Poodle named Colonel Birkenstock fell asleep on a bus and overshot his intended destination, finally to disembark in New York City with no plan and no way home.
The foundation of the song’s musical themes came in two waves. Andrew Schuster first approached the band with a rough outline of an acoustic guitar part he had been working on for a while. Gordon Lindley and JD Rodgers picked up the thread and added a driving but subdued beat and a second hypnotic guitar line to compliment the first. Max Gilbraith laid down a consistent drone on the bass, and the song’s opening section was essentially done in one session.
At first, the song was set to be a strictly instrumental sequel to one of IPJ’s very first songs, “Colonel Birkenstock Takes New York,” but, with inspirations that remain a mystery to this day, Evan DePuy conceived and suggested the “Missed my stop” hook, and from there the story was born, and it was decided that this new Colonel song would actually be a prequel to the first.
The second and third sections of the song were born straight out of the story. The band felt it simply didn’t make sense for the Colonel to realize he had missed his stop, and for the song to end with the same relaxed vibe as it had bounced around in throughout his slumber. There needed to be panic and confusion—a reason for the Colonel to ultimately hop off the bus and “take New York,” as it were. Gilbraith wrote the bulk of the heavy riffs in section 2, while Rodgers came up with the idea of the entire band taking on characters within the story and peaking the heaviness with an increasingly frantic argument and the Colonel’s subsequent banishment from the bus. The final section, in which the Colonel finds himself alone and without a plan in the concrete jungle of New York City, was based off of another Schuster lick that the band had been jamming on and felt fit the song perfectly.
It’s substantial length, open-tuned guitar line, and general complexity have always kept “Misses His Stop” firmly in the rarities column of the IPJ catalogue. Since its debut at Merchant’s Mile High Saloon in Denver on 12/12/2015, it has only been played 17 times—fewer than half as many times as either of the other songs in the Colonel Suite. Still, the song remains a favorite within the band, and is set to finally receive the love it deserves when it appears on IPJ’s long-awaited debut LP later this year.