B-Side Guys

Jody Lee left town at fifteen with stolen keys and a ’63 parked outside, and that’s about as much as Porch Coffin tells you directly. The rest of “Jody Lee” arrives as evidence: a family tree lined with poison apples, autumn leaves, a beach in Daytona gone sun sick, a parent’s divorce dated to some unspecified year in the ’90s. Nobody explains why any of it matters. The song just keeps setting objects down and moving on.

Twice, the song reaches for the same unfinished thought, “all she ever wanted was,” and stops short both times. Whatever comes after that gap gets replaced with more evidence, another location, another prop, until the final line finishes the sentence with a single word: love. Everything before it, the stolen car, the poisoned family tree, the sun-sick beach, was Porch Coffin building a case for a word it wouldn’t say until the last second.

Evan Blaine, who also performs as the professional wrestler Wolfe Taylor, fronts a band built on gritty, socially conscious anthems, and “Jody Lee” still sounds like one, dark and driving under all that plot. But the words themselves work like captions pinned under a photograph, brief and declarative, saving the real feeling for one final word. That instinct fits a band built around raw, DIY-minded production, letting a driving 90s-punk chassis carry lyrics stripped down to essentials.

Formed during the pandemic’s early isolation, Porch Coffin built its name on anthems meant for a room full of people. “Jody Lee” works as a single runaway’s story told in props, ending on the one word the whole song was circling.