“How much longer do we all have now?” Rainbow Girls ask on their latest single “Roads Must Roll.” Even with zero context, it seems like a cinderblock question. The Bay Area trio could be referring to anything from the next earthquake to the invention of flying cars. But we all know that their question doesn’t require any further context, especially when it’s sung with such earnest melancholy. The blossoming folk song inquires about an imminent end for us all, but Rainbow Girls make it sound like a whimsical journey. Maybe, the end isn’t so devastating after all.
“You know, just your classic end of the world song,” Caitlin Gowdey said of “Roads Must Roll.” “It’s got it all! Including maybe more sci-fi references than any self-respecting song should have? Named after The Roads Must Roll by Robert Heinlein, but kinda mostly inspired by the short story ‘Nightfall’ by Isaac Asimov, which is about a planet experiencing the coming of darkness for the first time. It’s about our dependence on technology, the end of a relationship, newsrooms, the disintegration of rural towns, planned obsolescence, and big sexy robots with lusty lasers.”
“Roads Must Roll” comes from their recently shared EP Rolling Dumpster Fire, which sounds like a great way to sum up the last few years. Their momentum didn’t stop during the beginning of the pandemic. At one point, Gowdey, Vanessa May, and Erin Chapin decided to literally set a dumpster on fire and record some songs in their home studio.
The handful of tracks is inspired by their life over these past insane couple years. “Free Wine” comes from when the group managed to get hundreds of bottles of wine from a winery that had been damaged from a California fire. “Due to insurance reasons they couldn’t sell anything scorched, so we got to pick up the bottles and live like fancy wine kings for the rest of the year,” said Gowdey. “I felt like we had stumbled into this bizarre social portal that we otherwise never could’ve afforded.”
Elsewhere, we’re brought into a “liminal zone between reality and the other: our dreams, our fantasies, our internet second life of TV shows and advertisements and Instagram filters,” Chapin explained. Rainbow Girls have summed up the mysterious and unnerving phases of pandemic life—getting lost in dreams, escaping in bouts of pleasure, and clinging to company when it’s available. We have to embrace it all, but really, we don’t know how much longer we have.
Listen to “Roads Must Roll” below and check out Rolling Dumpster Fire here.
