Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico

Donald Grose, aka Utopian Cow, moving to New Mexico and building his own house slots neatly into a lineage that runs from punk rock to land art to Americana music. Like Robert Smithson’s earthworks, it treats land not as backdrop but as medium—an insistence that meaning can be carved directly into the ground, outside institutions and markets. There’s a strong HB punk rock ethic in it too: DIY to the core, suspicious of polish, grounded in doing rather than asking permission. Building your own shelter echoes the same refusal that powered hardcore scenes—if the system doesn’t serve you, you build something else, louder or quieter, but on your own terms. And threaded through it all is Americana’s long obsession with self-reliance, wide-open spaces, weather, waiting, and work—the idea that songs, houses, and lives are shaped by timing, land, and grit. Grose’s house becomes a kind of lived artwork and folk song at once: an earthwork you can sleep in, a punk gesture slowed down to desert time.