This is a song! It’s called “Your Ambition.” It is the “lead single” from our upcoming album, The Joy Of Averages.
A lead single is the first single an artist releases, usually before the album from which the song derives is released.
There is an album. It has 11 songs. They have all been recorded, mixed, and mastered. The full album will be released later this year.
Because it’s good! It’s a fun four-minute rocker, guaranteed to make you lose your socks.
It’s an up-tempo guitar-pop-rock song. Think Weezer, but with a little bite!
Excellent question! You can stream “Your Ambition” on the following platforms:
There are lots of other music streaming services where the song is available (Did you know Napster is still around?), but these are the big ones.
On our YouTube channel, here. Or below.
Purchasing and owning music is different from listening to it on a music service. If you want to hear a specific song on Spotify, for example, you can do that till the cows come home, so long as you continue paying your Spotify bill, and have a decent internet connection, and as long as the artist doesn’t decide to pull their music from Spotify, and as long as Spotify doesn’t kick the artist off of the platform, or go out of business.
If you own the song, on the other hand, you get a file that you can do as you please with. You can put it on your phone. You can burn it to a CD. You can share it (Don’t do that! Or do.).
Plus, when you buy music, the artist gets much more of the cut than they do with the streaming services.
You can thank TJ Barends, who engineered, mixed, and mastered the song and the rest of the album at his studio, Bare Sounds in Ponchatoula, Louisiana. Visit them online here.
You can also thank Wade Hymel, who in addition to playing drums and guitar on this song and singing Beach Boys-style backing vocals also has great ideas for how to make things sound cool.
The lead singer on this song is Matt Stokes. Wade Hymel does the backing vocals as well as the drums. Guitars are done by Matt and Wade, and the bass is played by Patrick Perot.
Rural Route Nine is a band that started in Mandeville, Louisiana in 2005. With the release of the upcoming album, they will have completed a total of two albums in nearly two decades.
The members are Wade Hymel, who plays drums as well as pretty much every other instrument; Patrick Perot, the bass player; and Matt Stokes, who sings and plays guitar.
Rural Route Nine is a bad name for a band, and we’d change it if we could. Nobody hears it right the first time. “Rerr-rerr-rowt-nine?” Having numbers in your band name is also a bad idea, because there’s inevitable confusion about whether the number is a numeral or a word. Adding to the confusion is that we used a numeral in our band name (Rural Route 9) until very recently.
Like most things, “Rural Route 9” is a reference to The Simpsons.
It is first mentioned in the ninth season episode, “Lost Our Lisa.” Lisa Simpson, lost while riding a bus, hears the names of increasingly desolate-sounding stops, including, “Rural Route 9.”
In the eleventh season episode, “E-I-E-I-D’oh,” Homer Simpson accidentally crashes into a road sign that reads, “Rural Route 9.”
Matt Stokes wrote this song. He had the germ of the idea around 2011 and expanded it into a full song in 2020 when the world shut down and people stopped leaving their houses.
Yes! This demo, from early 2021, was recorded and performed entirely by Matt, hence the horrendous sound quality and poor drumming.
There is. We played it live for the first time on December 30, 2021, at the Maison in New Orleans. You can watch it on YouTube here.
