Premiere: D.B. Rouse toasts ‘The Only Designated Driver in Milwaukee is Having a Pity Party’
The Americana rabble-rouser cuts wit with blustering honky-tonk as he explores a designated driver’s unsung story.
The booze sloshes across the walnut bar top. The soft amber bar lights cast an even more somber glow across a sea of drunken faces, trapping them in fossils of time. The jukebox radiates with a slew of honky-tonk drinking ditties, from Merle Haggard’s “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” to Eric Church‘s “Drink in My Hand” and Midland‘s “Drinkin’ Problem,” a rugged chainlink of inebriation forever beholden to our culture’s love affair with the good-time buzz. You either seek to numb your pain or as an escape from the brutal mundanity of every day living. Such alcohol-induced exhibitions are the backbone of drinking songs in country music, but we rarely get a peek behind the curtain into the lives of the night’s true heroes: the designated drivers.
Americana singer-songwriter D.B. Rouse stages an insightful, witty, late-night outing with his new song “The Only Designated Driver in Milwaukee is Having a Pity Party,” a jangly barn-house line-dance. “The only DD in Milwaukee is having a pity party / Everyone’s out having fun, but he’s stuck sober driving / The whole town goes to the bar then wants a ride back in his car / The DD of Milwaukee is having a pity party,” sings Rouse, filling his flask on lonesome to drown out the nature of his reality. The once singing ranch hand by way of Austin continues to unravel the protagonist’s tragically poetic condition, as the arrangement escalates into a finger-plucked mania, “No one invites him out, spends happy hour by himself / Two AM comes around, he gets phone calls from everyone / He rolls out of bed onto the road / To take all of his friends and family home.”
Rouse is a man of many travels, who once worked as a lounge singer on a cruise ship and as a hobo for the Grand Canyon Railway. You could say he knows a thing or two about what it means to wriggle in misfortune, turning to his well-carved songcraft as a conduit for redemption and solace. He notably calls to the work of Woody Guthrie and John Prine, employing saucy, tightly-woven humor to elevate the human existence and staggering universal miseries. On the song, Rouse tells B-Sides & Badlands, premiering the song today, “Milwaukee has a somewhat heavy drinking tradition, which is one reason it’s the perfect setting for this song about the unsung hero of most drinking songs: the designated driver.”
“The Only Designated Driver in Milwaukee is Having a Pity Party” is lifted from Rouse’s upcoming album, Choices Were Made, out February 1.
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Photo Credit: Darin Dubinsky
