to the true believer, everything’s a sign

"Should I live to be one thousand years old, and write every day, and pursue my craft like an assassin on the trail of his quarry, tireless, my vision narrowed to take in only the object before it, viz., to write a better title than "Wizard Buys a Hat", yet do I know that it will never, ever happen; I will never peak, but, as titles go, "Wizard Buys a Hat", for me, is it, the grail toward which my titling days aspired, and every song after it ought to have gone nameless, or, better, to have been titled using a numbering system: 1+WBaH, 2+WBaH, et cetera. Just trying here to be honest with you about how I feel about the title of this song, which, in case you missed it, is "Wizard Buys a Hat"."

"Every good Catholic has pinups of the martyred saints on the dorm room wall of his mind, and no matter how many years ago you stopped going to church, you probably never left the Church. Indeed, when you stopped on the path, the moon high above you, thinking you'd heard something by the side of the road in the dark—what shone in the light of your torch? Only leaves, and branches, and the Church."

"Zheng said that when they climbed to the top of the mountain above Lake Tianchi at about 10 a.m., it was covered with thick fog that suddely gave way to bright sunshine. The water emerged as clear as a mirror, ideal for photography. Zheng's film lasts almost a minute, and in it a black object can be seen emerging from the water in the same place three times, each time lasting just a few seconds, before it finally vanishes and does not reappear."

—He Na, China Daily, July 11, 2005

"It's from Psalm 137:1, the "by the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion", one of the most beautiful poems in any language up until its last lines, at which point it becomes a fantasy of nightmarish violence. This song is about the murder of Prince Far I, whose body of work is some of the greatest music ever made. He loved the psalms while he lived, and I'd hazard that he loves them still."

"One of the several songs written in that Stockholm hotel room two stories below ground, not just lacking daylight but aggressively insulated from the daylight—see also "Autoclave" (July 12). With the stipulation that I personally am not the speaker in either song: The latter is a call for help, and this one is what happens after nobody answers."

"In my general experience, trying to marry your practice to your environment is a doomed effort. Go spend a week at the beach and try writing about the ocean, and watch your writing come up short of its theme. Tour diaries fail to capture the energy and chaos of touring; food writing is best done by people who haven't eaten yet. But I was in a subbasement two floors beneath ground level in a Stockholm hotel when I wrote this, and I hadn't seen daylight in at least twelve hours, so maybe there's something to the Environmental Theory of Poetics, which I just made up."

"Years later, in Devil House, I addressed this theme again: The hero is the character whose presence in the story defines the story. You are rooting for him whether you like it or not and whether you want to or not. This is not a problem with people but with heroes, which, I'd argue, gives meaning to the quotation marks around the word on the cover of David Bowie's "Heroes", quotation marks about which I have been idly musing for at least two-thirds of my life; if you get me started on them you'll lose at least ten minutes to the subject; we'll stop here."

Calling to ghosts down among the dry leaves / between subdivisions I found a few trees / where the apartments rise up from the mud / like alien invaders subsisting on blood / wire high and transcontinental / here's where we expected to see something jump from the shadows / and here's where the long shadows end / here's where the mosquitos would breed in the pools on the concrete / make straight the path for my new friend

"This is an unfinished draft from a notebook that contains: my notes to myself for a presentation I'd give to the New York offices of 4AD introducing them to the Get Lonely album; an early draft of "So Desperate" (July 22); several songs that would end up on Undercard by the Extra Lens, née Glenns, sometimes under different titles ("Cruiserweights" began life as "Quick Tillis Goes Through The Ropes"; let's please note that Tillis actually fought at heavyweight, sixty-five fights, forty-two wins with thirty-one by knockout); at least two attempts at the still uncompleted as of 2025 "Great Roman Families", a song about Primo Carnera; and the song title "The Sorcerer Self-Immolates in a Distant Clearing", corrected on the page from "The Sorcerer Bursts into Flames", a song that got no further than its title, but was followed, on the same page, by the following quotation from Elfriede Jelinek: "They remain at the edges of things, not because they're afraid of the light but because the light, understandably, is afraid of them."

Heretic Pride would be next."

"In my nursing days I worked with people who got lost. Lost to their families, lost to themselves, lost to the world. At a forty-hour job you get to know these people well, and to see fhrough their eyes a little, if you're paying attention. We err when we consider life as a continuum headed one way or the other—every life has seasons, or stations; the narrator here isn't doomed. He needs help. Everybody on Get Lonely is in need of help. The nylon-string acoustic is played on the track by Franklin Bruno, who also, I think, fleshed out the song's chords to have the sevenths that give it the character it needs—I think I sang live as he played; the original version was an up-tempo shuffle. We tried it some in studio. Thank God for producers like Scott Solter who'll tell you to your face when you're not doing justice to the song."

No one washed behind my ears—high in the trees, alone for years. Practicing my solitary scales 'til they rise like balloons, and watching them go where they will go.

Face in the leaves, song in my throat. Fall through the air hoping to float. Practicing my solitary scales until they grow heavy, too heavy to carry. Watching them go where they will go.

"Even the least astute reader will note that I'm rendering this as a sort of prose poem, instead of with line breaks. Most of the songs in the Coroner's Gambit notebook also appear there in this format—as paragraphs rather than verse—but of them only "Family Happiness" gave me pause. Here, there are breath breaks in the delivery that might suggest an on-page presentation like something by A. R. Ammons, but if I do it in sentences, it reads like a page from somebody's diary that they absolutely never intended for another living soul to see. That's the mood I was trying to strike on this album, and these technical questions are the kinds of things I think about to flesh out that mood."

-- JD in 'This Year: 365 songs annotated', 2025.

"I have this theory about songs—that the best ones live in the air but die on the page: or, if they don't die, have a different life on the page, one that can only be fully realised in the air. My theory is often wrong. "Get Lonely", for example, is really its own man on the page: different but not less than its fully clothed self, and in some ways more; its individual phrases have more air to breathe when they're not bound by the constraints of the song's running time. But "Woke Up New" is the case for the prosecution. It exists precisely within the span of its allocated length. The breaths that divide its phrases are part of it, but the page can't preserve this. I love this about songs so, so much—they alone can mark the reaches of the printed page as finite, they alone can take it a step further."

"I never did anything like this and I don't smoke any more, but at the same time, the guy who goes down to the gas station to buy smokes on a winter night and then lies down in a vacant lot he had to climb a fence to get into, that guy is me in every actually important way; if you want to find me in physical space then you have to ge the coordinates, but if you want to locate me spiritually you just have to look for the guy on his back in the vacant lot by the gas station. In this sense the song is pure autobiography, but in no other sense."

"I always picture, in my mind, the front door of the house in which I wrote this song, and myself dead bolting it, even though I was never lonely in that house once—it was a house of love and shared growth and shared struggle and change, all the things that loneliness is not. And so I think, when I sing it: This is the mark loneliness leaves on you, to warn you against finding anything romantic in it. Once known, forever remembered."

"Anybody who knows me spots that this is pure fiction from its first line, which, if it were me speaking, would begin "It was raining outside / so I complained about that and then played video games all day", but this is the advantage to storytelling instead of self-disclosure: Instead of repeating things you already know about yourself, you end up with a line like "what are the years we gave each other ever going to be worth?" I will take this bargain every time."