Orion's Chasing the Dogs
SG Goodman's (Re) Planting by the Signs
We live in a world where music costs nothing to access. A device in your pocket delivers millions of songs in milliseconds. No more flipping through CD racks at Walmart, no more walking into an independent record store hoping they have something good running on the speakers so you stumble into something you didn’t know you needed. AI will build you a playlist from a vibe you describe in a sentence, and it’ll do a damn fine job of it. None of that is bad. Access is good. Discovery is good.
But there’s something different about buying the record. I picked up the original Planting by the Signs on vinyl about thirty days ago. When the rerelease dropped in May I thought, well, that’s a good enough reason to figure out what I’m actually hearing. Sometimes a record earns that kind of attention. This one does.
Fair warning before we go further: what follows are my interpretations. I did not interview SG Goodman. I did not verify my readings against her intent. Some of this is probably right. Some of it she’d hear and say “fuck off.” That’s fine. If you want to know what she actually meant, ask her. I didn’t. I just listened.
The first time I saw a satellite — one I actually knew was a satellite — I was in high school. One of the few benefits of growing up in a rural area is limited light pollution and genuinely beautiful summer night skies. I was at a friend’s place near the lake. A light crossed the sky, steady and deliberate. I’d seen enough airplanes and helicopters to know it wasn’t that. My friend told me what it was. Something shifted. The wonder didn’t disappear exactly, but it recalibrated. I was watching a machine pretending to be a celestial body and doing a decent job of it. A decent job isn’t the same thing as the real thing.
That memory is where SG Goodman’s (Re) Planting by the Signs found me.
The Concept
I own several Foxfire books - an anthology of rural past, a preservation of knowledge the world was busy forgetting while it was still being practiced. The first anthology hit shelves in 1972 and became a surprise bestseller. Twelve volumes followed over the next two decades, over nine million copies sold, the project eventually becoming a nonprofit that still runs today. If you’ve never spent time with them, foxfire.org is worth your afternoon. Fair warning — you may end up owning several.
We live in a time where rural carries a connotation, and it isn’t always flattering. There’s a version of rural that gets used as shorthand for something lesser, something to leave behind. Speaking as someone who grew up in and around that world — not the bitter version, just the honest one — there’s a beauty in the quiet of it, a grounding in simplicity that gets dismissed too quickly by people who’ve never sat with it. The Foxfire books exist to say that what happened in those hills and hollers was worth writing down.
The knowledge is real. It’s also increasingly available — apps, databases, agricultural extensions, all of it — and that’s genuinely useful. But there’s something different about being the app. About carrying that knowledge in your body because your grandmother carried it in hers. That’s where Goodman lives.
She found the planting by the signs section in that first 1972 volume and it unlocked something she’d been carrying since childhood without quite naming it. Her grandmother had her taken off the breast according to the moon. This isn’t a concept she discovered — it’s one she was born inside of. She spent more than a year researching it before she wrote a single song, poring over the Foxfire series and other texts, interviewing practitioners, until the images and details could arrive naturally instead of feeling forced.
Worth clarifying what planting means here — this isn’t commercial farming. This is subsistence farming. Growing what you can to survive off. Excess goes to trade with neighbors for what you can’t or don’t grow. A simple but hard economy built entirely on timing, knowledge, and the willingness to pay attention to things older than any algorithm.
The moon affects water. Water moves through everything living. Timing matters in ways the dashboard can inform but can’t replace.
The Record
Heaven Sold
Ninety-nine seconds of something that sounds like a monk chant. Sparse, repetitive, deliberately cleansing. A null set. Whatever you walked in with, put it down. The stars got sold. Now here we are.
Satellite
Follows immediately and the connection isn’t subtle — we traded the stars for a machine that mimic them. Apprehensive optimism underneath a kick drum that sets the pace like a heartbeat. A vocal that wants to believe things are okay but keeps watching the sky while it says so. The central image puts the moon and the satellite in the same verse — one pulls on tides and biology and the old signs, the other pulls on your attention. Same sky. Different relationship. The refrain lands as grief more than accusation. Look what it’s done to you.
Fire Sign
The biographical track, operating on at least two levels simultaneously. The astrological — fire signs are seekers, restless, driven, the ones who ask who’ll put the fire out and mean it as a dare. And then the one that only makes sense if you grew up near this world: in rural areas, a fire sign is the marker at the end of a long driveway. When emergency services need to find a property down a dirt road they can’t see from the highway, that sign is how they find you. No sign at the end of a driveway when there’s a fire, the people who put it out can’t locate it. Born a seeker, old story keeper. She’s locating herself in all systems at once.
The turn rows in the lyric are worth a moment — the unplanted headland at the end of a crop row where you turn the tractor(or any other planting implement), the necessary margin between passes. She’s navigating the spaces between. The psychedelic quality of the vocal over a driving beat isn’t an accident — exhausted and relentless at the same time, the fire burning whether or not anyone can find it.
I Can See the Devil
A gut check and a lesson in cultural fluency. The devil isn’t abstract — he’s beating on an old lady. The mamas working for a dollar appear in cities and hollers in the same line, same devil different zip code. The death row last meal is potlikker hugging on a hambone and Karo syrup on spoon bread and butter. Not a steak. Karo is thick corn syrup — dark or light — the thing that ends up on hot biscuits with butter because it fills a sweet hunger when you don’t have much. The most ordinary, nothing-wasted food of a specific Southern rural upbringing.
Worth noting: almost every lyric database online got Karo wrong. Multiple sites, multiple guesses, none of them landing because none of them know what Karo is in that context. The song has a built-in filter. If you know, you know. If you don’t, your guess reveals exactly where you’re from and what you’ve never had on a biscuit. Walking in the sunshine as the response to the devil isn’t naivety — it’s a specific kind of resilience that doesn’t require the devil to stop existing.
Snapping Turtle
Moves like its name suggests — slow, comfortable rise and fall, ripples in water. The turtle is the frame but Leanna is the subject. At eighteen she became a mother and had already raised her little brother. She spent a summer in Paris, Tennessee — the only Paris she’d ever meet. In the song Goodman was on a train through the south of France at the same time, young and poor and weighing her circumstance. Same starting point, probably same dreams, different trajectories — and the difference isn’t character or ambition, it’s luck. The other side of luck. The song has the discipline not to rescue Leanna or offer a lesson. It just holds the two images next to each other and lets the distance speak. Life is cruel no matter where you are in the world. The horrible beauty of it.
Michael Told Me
Builds urgency without becoming frenetic. The repetition of heard I love you from Los Angeles before the verse even moves — that’s the distance the whole song is about, love transmitted across geography and years of drift. The chorus articulates what friendship should be: threading the needle, setting the bone, holding someone’s legs while they scream because you know where the pain is coming from. Good friends give honest truths and then sit with you in them. Setting a bone isn’t gentle — it hurts more in the moment than the break did.
The chorus is the ideal. The verses are what happened. Michael Harmon was a real person — mentor, father figure, the band practiced in the quonset hut behind his house. He died in 2023 while she was writing this album. The song does the rest.
Solitaire
The beautiful one. A slow melody over a story of solitude that understands solitude better than most songs about loneliness manage to. You’re bound to lose if you bet against yourself. Two non-believers searching for ashes for their heads find not a church in town with a priest out of bed. They want the ancient ritual of grief and the institution that’s supposed to provide it is asleep. The bridge names the risk plainly: there’s a flaw in the turn. The agricultural margin again — and you might lose the river while you’re playing cards alone.
I’m in Love
A Sunday morning. What love does to solitary people, hard people. Suddenly RSVPing to things she knows she won’t attend, swimming naked in the neighbor’s pool, half hour conversations with strangers in the checkout line. The moon is right for cutting her hair and she’s checking out Walmart underwear collections. The ancient practice and the utterly mundane in the same two lines. Just let it run.
Nature’s Child
The soft yells and calls in the opening verse are the whole argument before a proper lyric arrives — before language, before structure, just a body making sound in response to the world. That’s nature’s child. A person who still has that in them. Two intimate souls in a tender moment, the junkyard king and his lady, marry me in inclement weather. Something private you accidentally overheard. After all the hard songs, this is the exhale. The reminder of what all the planting is for.
Heat Lightning
The front porch version of love. Centuries of summer-evening porch sitters watched the silent flashes, noticed they happened in hot weather, and named it accordingly. The folk term stuck because the alternative — distant thunderstorm lightning — doesn’t sit on a porch nearly as well. The porch sitters weren’t wrong that something was happening. They just named it from experience rather than a meteorology textbook. Which is exactly what planting by the signs is.
The love she’s describing exists at that same distance. You can see it from a hundred miles away but the thunder doesn’t reach you. The old timer’s voice preserved in an audio recording at the end of the track is the oral tradition the whole album is built around. Most people will skip past it. Don’t. It flows directly into the title track and suddenly the love song has a philosophy behind it.
Planting by the Signs
The thesis made song. Orion chasing the dogs across the western Kentucky sky in late winter isn’t poetry — it’s a calendar. When Orion is visibly pursuing Canis Major toward the western horizon the planting window is open. In western Kentucky that’s late February through April. What goes in the ground then: onions, peas, mustard greens, spinach, beets. The patient crops. The ones built for cold. You don’t plant tomatoes in March. You plant what can handle the conditions and wait.
The plastic stars on the bedroom ceiling alongside Orion — the satellite again, but tender here, because in the context of love even the imitation will do when the intention is true. The pedal steel underneath it all sounds like the sky bending toward you.
Heaven Song
Nine minutes that earn every second. The Chevy Malibu as the vessel of a life. Love hitching a ride at the first red light. Faith, Hope, Sin, and a drunk Jesus at the hotel bar — Jesus saying it’s hard being him when folks think God’s on their side. The most theologically honest line on this or possibly any album. Every war, every injustice, every cruelty committed with divine certainty lives in that sentence.
Real and Authenticity as twins you can barely tell apart, Real having a scar at the dip of his jaw — the mark that living leaves on what’s true. Howard the dog died in the night before they reach Heaven’s gate. The Malibu becomes a hearse before they hit the mud hole outside Heaven. Sin holds her at the gate until she answers for herself. The chorus — maybe if I see it then I’ll want it — is not belief and not denial. It’s someone driving toward something uncertain because stopping isn’t in the vocabulary. Neither sad nor happy, neither rushed nor restricted. Road trip speed.
The Bonus Tracks
I’m in Love — Dan Reeder
Reeder steps outside the song. Goodman’s original is a confession. Reeder’s is a portrait. He sings the whole thing in first person then shifts at the very end — she’s in love — stepping back and observing the person he loves being undone by love. His lo-fi domestic voice sounds like it was captured in the same kitchen where she’s been dancing and singing into a spoon. He produced the original, heard this song before almost anyone. His version is his response. Make of that what you will.
Heat Lightning Redux
Inside the clouds. Where the original is front porch observation — the safe version, the one where the storm is a hundred miles away — the redux is what happens when the distance collapses. Drum and cymbal driven, gritty, distorted guitar underneath the same lyrics. Joan Jett territory: driven beats underneath a vocal that holds its ground against the noise because it was always stronger than it looked.
Pepper
If you were a teenager in the nineties you already know this song. It was one of those tracks that felt like it shouldn’t work but absolutely did. Goodman runs it through humbuckers and a brush on the cymbals and a juke joint guitar solo that situates the whole thing somewhere along the Tennessee River. Soft calm delivery over light distortion makes the casualties feel inevitable rather than surreal. She builds to a louder second chorus, the narrator waking up inside the song, actually trying to look through other people’s eyes rather than just filing a report. The band steps off at the end: we’re gonna take a break and get a drink, y’all do the same.
The Butthole Surfers original is weird like a car crash. Goodman’s version is weird like a dream you can’t shake. She maintained the weirdness through stillness, which is harder than it sounds and most people can’t pull it off.
Planting by the Signs — Senora May and Tyler Childers
The full circle. Goodman has said Senora May was one of the first people she spoke with about building an album around this concept. It turns out May’s father farms by the signs — she didn’t just know the philosophy, she grew up inside it. The cover was recorded in the cabin where May and Childers met, and to Goodman’s knowledge it was the first time the couple had ever recorded together.
The first third of the track is intimate — the solitude of two well known lovers, settled, singing from inside the thing rather than toward it. Then the production opens up and what was a close two shot becomes a wide landscape: two small figures under Orion, a warbly organ somewhere between a musical saw and a leslie speaker sitting underneath like something ancient and slightly unnameable.
A Note on Public Radio¹
The royalties from the Childers and Senora May cover go to WKMS, Goodman’s local NPR station in Murray, Kentucky — which supported her career from the beginning, including giving her one of her first sold out shows after she won their Battle of the Bands. I know WKMS from my time on the board of a local community theater. They gave us airtime, promoted our events, showed up for on-air conversations about what we were doing like it actually mattered — because it did. That’s what local public radio does. It shows up for the things that don’t have marketing budgets.
With federal defunding of public media creating real pressure on rural stations specifically, the gesture isn’t incidental. It’s a statement. Goodman put it plainly: Kentucky neighborly fashion, east to west, taking care of neighbors. You take care of the things that took care of you.
Long live local radio. Long live local artists. Long live the ones who write in a language that requires you to have lived near something to hear correctly.
¹ WKMS is the NPR affiliate station at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, serving western Kentucky and surrounding regions. The station faces funding pressure consistent with broader federal cuts to public media. Goodman has been a public advocate for WKMS and directed proceeds from the Childers and Senora May track specifically to support the station. If you’d like to support local public radio in your own community, most NPR affiliates accept direct donations at their station websites. To find your local affiliate, visit npr.org.