I Saw A Bug isn’t a lonesome highway; it’s an American cabaret. There are backcountry signifiers, to be sure—banjo and pedal steel and fingerstyle guitar—but there are also eerie synths and drum machines and MIDI programming that make the album feel like a slightly extraterrestrial simulacrum of American music. Almost as if aliens were trying to recreate the country and western songbook based on the handful of AM radio signals that had finally made it past Alpha Centauri.