I put a billboard on I-75

For one Sunday this month, if you drove past the outlet mall on I-75, my name was forty feet wide over the interstate.

I told the people I work with about it beforehand. They laughed. Not mean-spirited — the good kind of laughing, the kind you do when your coworker who does data analysis all week tells you his music is going up on a billboard. Somebody asked who my marketing team was and I told them the truth: it's a very small operation, and it works out of my house.

Here's the honest math on it: a billboard doesn't sell albums. Nobody drives home from the outlet mall and streams a record because a sign told them to. I knew that going in. That's not what it was for.

It was for the same reason you frame a photo. Some things you do so they exist — so there's a Sunday on the record where the songs I wrote at my kitchen table were up over the highway in the town I write them about. I drove out and filmed it, because of course I did. Some purchases are really just proof you were here.

You can't frame a summer. Turns out you can rent one billboard's worth of it, for one day, and that's close enough.