to the true believer, everything’s a sign

No one wasbed 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."

"The canary in the mine saves you from what killed the canary when you released it into the mine, but you also don't get to see the inside of the mine. That is the trade-off."

"I don't, ever, sit down and say: "What am I doing next?"—I just work; that is my process, to just start writing and see where it goes. The Sunset Tree was considerably more successful than anybody expected, I think it's fair to say. I am proud that my natural impulse was to follow up with an album that digs itself a dark tunnel underground and builds a little bunker inside it. The songs on Get Lonely are closer to the poems-set-to-music standard I'd aspired to early on, but with the advantage of more mileage on the tires."

"I made a bunch of hand-drawn little booklets while I was writing We Shall All Be Healed—they were like homemade comic books, sort of, and they were called Chavo Guerrero Is Champion of the World. Doing these and thinking about the Olympic Auditorium while writing The Sunset Tree got me meditating about pro wrestling, which I'd been absolutely marked out for when I was eleven and twelve years old. Ox Baker came to LA once and said he was going to kill Chavo Guerrero. I believed him then and I believe him now. Rest easy, Ox. Your ability to scare the shit out of me was without any earthly peer."

"This is the one that got away, one of my favourites of the Get Lonely bunch. We did not manage to better the demo in the studio. That's the yardstick: Studio version beats the demo or the song doesn't make the record. At some point I shared that demo online; had I not done so on the day I did that, it'd be lost forever, most likely, since the laptop from which I shared the demo is now dead. Those studio sessions still exist, though; they're on two-inch reels in my dark basement, magnetic particles slowly shedding, seeking their destiny. Going away. Going invisible."

"We can have our disagreements about the existence and nature of ghosts but on one question I will give no ground, ever: They feel pain. Even in their insubstantial bodies they experience pain like what they felt while still corporeal. If they don't eat, they get pangs. What they eat and how they eat it, about this we can all have our little opinions. But it hurts to be a ghost. That is why they try to make themselves known. So you'll notice."

"Astrid Lindgren, the author of Pippi Longstocking, once gave a reading at the library where my mother worked; when it came time for questions, the children all asked variants of the same question. Is Pippi real? Is Tommy real? Is Annika real? Is Villa Villekulla real? "Oh, yes," Lindgren replied to each question with grandmotherly patience. "Pippi is real, Tommy and Annika are real." In the spirit of that legendary villa, so are the black pumps, and the long-sleeved Oxford, and above all the need for some money to keep the information emgine humming on its way to where it's headed."

munitions-grade plutonium dealer / came through town in his eighteen-wheeler / I crawled out from underneath / by the skin of my chipped front teeth / College Avenue near first / where the demons did their worst / when the sun shines through the glaze / I remember awful days

poison candy puff cream cloud / all the good air leaking out

tortured stucco architecture of the / uncompleted parking structure / got ready for my burst of glory / and climbed up to the second story / college avenue near first / call the coroner, book the hearse / my whole God damned family was crazy and I / was just 14, and ready to die

strike while the iron's still nice and hot: / you people can stay here but I will NOT

crawled up on the railing there / ran my hand through my long brown hair / looked down at the railroad track / felt the cool wind on my neck / cloudy poison candy cream / had a girlfriend named Marci Dehm / she was going to be mad as hell / when they scraped my brains up from the stairwell / looked down maybe a minute too long: / who's strong today, and who's not so strong?

train crossing tolling: ding-dong bell / back to the castle where the monsters dwell

"Written in the dressing room of a club in Amsterdam during the We Shall All Be Healed tour that led to the Peel Session at Abbey Road. I was, by the time of its writing, deep within myself: grieving, I say now, not having said so about that time prior to this very moment but knowing, now, that it's the right word. All capitalisation and line-spacing preserved as nearly as possible from the handwritten draft. I wrote music for it in that dressing room, too, and I can still remember the verses, but this is too private to take it further, and I record it here only to give the Sunset Tree songs their proper context. It is a true story about a day when I wanted to kill myself and could not. Later that day I put my fist through the window of my bedroom. I was just a kid, I know now, but I could not imagine, on that day, ever getting any older."

"Tyler Lambert was Dana Plato's son (see February 17); Plato struggled with addiction from an early age, like many child entertainers. She was twenty years old when she became a mother. She lost custody of her son, Tyler, in divorce proceedings, when he was six; nine hard years down the line, in her Winnebago RV parked outside her manager's mother's house, she died of an overdose. Tyler was fourteen. A decade on he took his own life with a shotgun. "These past ten years have been pure Hell", his grandmother told People magazine. This is a sad story of people trying without success to break free from the past, of compulsions and apparitions. It is a song about the desperate feeling you get when you have run out of hopeful synonyms for "try"."

"The most metaphorical song on The Sunset Tree is also one of my favourites; formally it's of a piece with "The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix's Life", but turning inward and with a lot more road behind me. It's one of three songs on the album whose vantage point is from a little farther down the line; of those three, this one is nearest to what I'll hesitantly call the action, maybe two years after getting out of the house. Loose internal ends were fraying within me just as anybody might have predicted, with predictable, if spectacular, results."

"I wrote this sometime in the Tallahassee span of time, and my home recording of it served as a B-side for the first single on our new label, 4AD. It is not part of the Tallahassee cycle. It's a study for "You or Your Memory"; the bargain-priced room on La Cienaga was actually in the Pico-Crenshaw district (and was not, truth be told, on La Cienaga at all). I was working weekends in Pico-Crenshaw and staying at a motel overnight so as not to tax my car's engine. Time alone in a motel, as we'll see in July, can take you some places when the elements align."