Cascadia Calling 2025.07.14

"the droning engine throbs in time with your beating heart"

It’s the hottest day in July. Or rather, it was a few days ago. I was driving my mom up North along Division, Spokane’s most blighted stroad. She asked what the temperature was. My car dash reported 104.

“Can that be right?” She asked.

“Sure could be.” I said.

Heat always exhausts me. I grew up in the desert, but too many year living in Seattle have turned me into an amphibian. In heat like this I want to bury myself in mud and sleep until fall. When I got home just after 5, I collapsed on the couch. I tried to read, but I fell asleep. I woke up two hours later and it was still bright daylight outside. The thermometer on my back porch read 98.

I first encountered this song sampled at the beginning of a friend’s DJ set sometime in 2004 or 2005. I think of it now every time I’m caught in one of these hot, lazy, melting summers. It’s an odd song, especially for Duran Duran. It serves as a kind of prelude to a song they’d released over a decade earlier, “The Chauffeur”. It’s so out of character for the band (and I am, admittedly not a Duran Duran completionist) that I didn’t know it was a Duran Duran track until several years after I first heard it, and it would never have occurred to me that it was.

Paired with “The Chauffeur”, “Drive By” makes much more sense musically and thematically. “The Chauffeur” has a dreamlike quality presaged by the lyrics, the shared use of the haunting, trilling synthetic woodwind draws a nice through line. It also shows off Simon Le Bon’s impressive stylistic range between

Speaking of sampling, “The Chauffeur” makes use of a Fairlight CMI, an early digital sampler for the insect sounds and the odd distorted speech just before the four minute mark. It’s interesting to see such early use of sampling for textural elements, rather than melodic or lyrical ones.

As a pair, the songs make an interesting backwards crawl through time and create a kind of fever dream world of the sort that my baked brain will be serving up if this heat lasts too much longer.