Lost Mary member Luke Martin stands next to a vintage Ford.
COURTESY | Jack Cote
While Hillsdale County has rapidly changed over the years, it has kept the quiet simplicity of most Midwestern towns — at least according to alumni band Lost Mary’s new song “Vintage Ford.”
“Vintage Ford” follows a single the band released last year, part of the new album that is set to be completed in the summer of 2025, according to band members Luke Martin ’17 and David Johnson ’17.
“We released a single in December that wasn’t going to be a single at all, but it was the first one that was ready and had already been mastered,” Martin said. “We wanted to keep going with the algorithm for Spotify, since our numbers were up, so we wanted to capitalize on it and release ‘Vintage Ford’ as a single.”
The song, written by Martin, seeks to invoke the nostalgia for a hometown and facing challenges throughout life. With lyrics in “Vintage Ford” such as “The holes in the roads get deeper each year, the creeks been collecting old cans of beer,” the song aims to romanticize the rural small towns across the Midwest, Martin said.
“The songwriting process was about pulling out the nostalgic aspects of Michigan, because we’re a rural town, and yet, things are always happening,” Martin said. “Technology keeps advancing, progressing, and ‘Vintage Ford’ is almost like a call back to the old.”
Martin and Johnson said the song highlights the beauty of tradition in rundown towns because this atmosphere built those towns.
According to Johnson, Lost Mary intends to continue releasing a few songs at a time in order to gain followers based on the Spotify algorithm.
“Nowadays, with streaming it’s good for the algorithm to just keep releasing singles, as opposed to just dumping it all up,” Johnson said.
“Vintage Ford,” although intended to be the band’s first release, follows a few months after the release of “Pere Lachaise,” according to Martin.
“‘Vintage Ford’ was going to be the original first on the album, but that one just was not finished,” Martin said. “I wrote it maybe a-year-and-a-half to two years ago, and the demo version is a lot different than the version we have now, but they both have their places.”
Martin, who writes and composes most of Lost Mary’s songs, said the inspiration for songwriting can be challenging and takes a significant amount of time.
“The lyrics take the most amount of time. Sometimes it’ll take me 12 hours to come up with two lines. It’s a very painful process,” Martin said. “It’s about trying to create something that holds together well. We’ve heard so many bands with crappy lyrics — it’s a great melody, but the lyrics just fall short.”
The duo said they produce their music in Canada but record demos and do final touches in their Hillsdale studio.
“We recorded ‘Vintage Ford’ up in Canada with our producer this past summer, and then our producer sits on the songs for a couple months — because everyone’s sick of the songs by that point — we usually let them marinate a little bit then he sends us back the mixes,” Martin said. “Then we will come back here and record the overdub in case certain elements sound better in our studio.”
Johnson said the lyrics of “Vintage Ford” stand out in the album with a happier tone and lean into a more country genre which has differed from their previous releases and their next album.
“It almost sounds like a cheesy country song, but it’s not country,” Johnson said. “This is a happier song on the album because it is a sadder album, they are generally upbeat but have a central message that is on the sad side.”
According to Martin, many of their songs are reflections of growing up and beckon a nostalgia to the past.
“Everyone is scared of change, but there are some beautiful things in the past,” Martin said. “As you know we are all getting older and we like to reminisce on the past and about the old times.”
