Bike Routes’ Sophomore Album is an Ode to New Jersey

David Osterhout, the voice and life behind Bike Routes, shares the making of his sonically matured second album and love for New Jersey

PHOTOS BY ABBIE MURPHY

Maybe New Jersey sucks, but maybe it’s the best place in the world. Just about anyone from there will tell you no one can hate it but us. Perhaps New Jersey’s biggest fan and defender in music is David Osterhout, whose band Bike Routes probably wouldn’t exist if he wasn’t raised in the Garden State. 

“I say this all the time in a very anti-pop punk way. I don’t hate my hometown, and I don’t hate New Jersey,” he said in an interview with Pleaser.

Osterhout tells us his no-limits musical interests are largely defined by his upbringing — hearing Bruce Springsteen in the car with his dad while simultaneously going to hardcore shows in Philly, and yet also listening to ABBA and Whitney Houston with his mom. And when he started jamming with friends in high school, he didn’t have a plan to make music his career. 

“There was no, ‘Alright, we’re gonna sell out this show, we’re gonna get a van, we’re gonna drive across the country, we’re gonna tour the world,’” he said. “It was more just like, ‘Who will let me play their basement tonight?’”

Last year, the band picked up success with his EP Rush of Energy, which has pulled in over two million streams thanks to the premiere single “World Apart.” The sound was a stark departure from his first album Love is an Action (2022), but when you look at the whole picture of Bike Routes, the evolution starts to make sense. Now, Prairie is following the movement and redefining what a Bike Routes song sounds like. Really, Osterhout dreamt of his music sounding this way — a blend of all his influences — from the start.

Osterhout says the first album was written with the intention of being fully acoustic, so once it became a full band production, he began wondering what other shapes Bike Routes’ music could take on. 

“Rush of Energy is kind of a hodgepodge of sounds. ‘You Want It You Got It’ is reminiscent of Love is an Action, but then ‘Nebraska’ is not anything like that. We were experimenting on Rush of Energy [with] what felt right and what we could do,” he said. “Prairie is the actualization of those two previous projects.” 

There’s no shortage of firsts for Bike Routes on Prairie. There’s a new layer of brass (“Delicate,” “There It Goes”), making his influences from Springsteen to Bleachers to The 1975 especially evident. The titular track “Out On The Prairie” is the one Osterhout said even he was most surprised by in the end, having re-recorded, re-written and re-arranged it more than once. Both that track and “Shadows” border on the more angsty side of his musical interests, though the latter he said was a surprise in how easily it came to fruition. 

Other songs challenged him in the lyric process, like the closing track “The Good Curse” and “Replacements,” an inevitable hit-in-the-making. To a listener, that would likely come as a surprise — both feel effortlessly true to the album’s heart and have many of the trademarks of Osterhout’s writing. Just about every song reveals a penchant for imagery of both biblical proportions and the most grounded connections, but one motif really stands out among them all on Prairie.

PHOTOS BY ABBIE MURPHY

Two voices, both running 

Of the 11 tracks on Prairie, only one never uses the word “run.” It’s an album perpetually in motion, running from and chasing after and stuck in a loop. But while the lyrics are so specific and at times vulnerable, they are ultimately telling a story — one Osterhout said isn’t coming from just one narrator.

“As I was writing the songs, it became apparent to me…I haven’t even really thought too deeply on it, but I like to think that there’s two different people singing on this record, two different identities,” he said.

“I feel like it’s about two people who are running from the same thing, but for different reasons. One person’s running because they have to, and the other person’s running just because, why not?”

These different voices come out in a number of ways across the record. Of course, there are more uplifting, nearly pop tracks (“Runners”) to contrast the punchy, in your face rock tracks (“Ripley”). With that, there’s also a contrast in the attitude. They can be a bit tongue in cheek, throwing the truth in your face because they can, and then one track later is raw with the scale of the world. It’s all very literary — not surprising given Osterhout’s affinity for classics and writers like Cormac McCarthy and John Steinbeck. 

“I’ve always been enthralled by the landscape of a story, and I think that’s what Prairie is to me.” 

When it’s not running, Prairie is full of “dancing in, prancing in the rain” (“Shadows”)  and shooting at their feet just to make them dance (“There It Goes”). Lyrically, the tracks spare no emotion too dark — thinking about how he’ll die and whether it’ll be alone — but sonically, they demand to move through the listener. 

And then, of course, the ultimate contrast of the album comes from the core theme of running away or running from, and the fact that Bike Routes seems to have no intention to abandon New Jersey. It’s all there from the beginning, the conflict summed up in the opening track “Homeward Bound”: “And then it all comes back around / Like some dead end street in some dog sh*t town / That you can’t escape / Man I love this place / something about makes me want to stay alive.” 

Don’t you understand that there’s never been a plan?

Anticipation for this release is buzzing after the stellar run Bike Routes has been on. Osterhout seems to always be on the road, but recently played a memorable show right at home, opening the Bleachers album release show at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. When we met up to talk about the album, he was on a four-city tour stopping in Nashville, and later this week, he’ll be heading back out for a set of release shows starting in Richmond, VA.

And yet, Osterhout is in a constant state of gratitude that anyone comes to hear his music. A crowd is never an expectation for him, and he is adamant that he would have been happy just playing at coffee shops and record stores in Jersey. When he writes things like “I can’t surrender New Jersey. And I can’t surrender, New Jersey,” a quote pulled deep from his Instagram posts, he speaks to his genuine appreciation of the place he’s from. 

“I wouldn’t dream of forgetting where I’m from. I always say it could all go away tomorrow and that’s fine, but if it ever took off and blew up, I would still go to local shows every week,” he said.

“The New Jersey scene, the Philly scene, they let me come play terrible songs with two chords when I was 17. And I can truly say if I didn’t feel welcomed, I probably wouldn’t have tried to continue to the degree that I did.”

He said that when he was teaching himself guitar as a teen, the end goal was to know enough to have fun — though it’s clearly become so much more. The premiere single for Prairie was “Delicate,” and it posed this whole concept in just two lines: “Don’t you understand that there’s never been a plan? / I just wanna join the band and fall asleep in the van.” The irony, for this song, is that no plan worked out into a feature from Jake Clemons, the saxophonist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, bringing these dreams and reality together. 

At its core, Osterhout said this album is about “where you’re from.” Within his songs, it seems all roads lead back to New Jersey. “The Good Curse” concludes the album with a lament and a refrain, each part of his home tearing him open from the inside out. The love for this place can be a curse, one we all think about running from and yet feels impossible to leave behind. But all things considered, through the lens of Bike Routes, it’s a pretty good curse to have.