The song "Send Me A Postcard" was one of the last to be written for our album The Way Out and it's the only one that actually features the album title in its lyrics. It started as something we had on the back burner and weren't intending on including it on the album. While we were doing pre-production demos, we put down all of the tracks as an instrumental that I was going to use for myself when I was working on ideas for the vocals. My part came together quickly and I was ready to put most of it down when I went in to finish my parts for the demos. It's the first song that I wrote my part for and tracked before any of the other guys heard what I wanted to do with it vocally and lyrically. It was fun to bring it to them all tracked and show it off instead of working on my parts to the music as we were writing the rest of the song.

The Way Out applies to all of the songs on the album in different ways. In this one, we are looking for a way out of the path that we are on with where we could be headed as a species. The song is about living in an unsustainable manner in general but was originally intended to be directed to the Earth itself personified as a character that's deciding to be through with us as we are "wearing it down" and "we're all going down with the ship." The lyrics "losing your cool" refers to climate change. I thought it was a clever way to bring it up as if the planet were someone hitting a breaking point and leaving an abusive relationship. Does it sound preachy after I explain it that way? Just a bit, but I said it first.

The video was a great experience for me although the process was a lot more difficult and time consuming than I had anticipated. We shot the whole thing late at night in the few days right after Christmas and it was freezing cold the entire time which made it a lot tougher. I was basically given the go ahead to take on the job of coming up with the storyline, locations, and casting along with help from the crew at Avast Productions. They helped brainstorm and nail down all of the ideas I had to a workable premise. They built a helmet mounted camera for the POV shots. The convenience store is one I go to several times a week as it's right across the street from where I work. They let us come in after they closed on a Saturday night and shoot until 5 am. The scenes inside the house are in Colbey Schnelle (bass player) and his girlfriend Julie's house. The cast of extras include close friends of ours, the kid with the video game who runs into the main character is my 11 year old son Cole, and my sister is also in there. We made sure to include some inside jokes like Colbey with a corn dog, our friend Lenny from The Fail Safe Project putting mustard on a hot dog, and a couple other things throughout the video. Our original bass player's son Brandon plays the main character.

Where we ended up with the storyline was pretty far from what I originally wanted to do because we had to change things on the go mostly due to time constraints. I think most people have to really dig into the video to figure out what they think is happening which kind of sucks but it gives us more freedom to take it somewhere else when it comes time to continue the story in another video, which is something I want to do. Basically, the main character is supposed to be a robot who sets out to observe our society and attempt to blend in. All of the humans around him notice that there is something different about him and react negatively. Another robot, played by Joe Mascerello, who has given up on humans as his system degrades and he gets closer to shutting down follows him through the story and tries to persuade him to abandon his mission. Colbey, Dan, and I played music with Joe for many years and he's one of my best friends so it was very cool to have him involved. He put together everything for his character and made it his own. Every time I explain what's up with the story to someone, it sounds silly because that's what it is and we had a ton of fun with it.