to the true believer, everything’s a sign

[for context: the lyrics here are printed with slashes rather than line breaks at certain points on the page]

"The slashes: They were in the original document when I dug it up for this book. The text itself I like a lot, but at the moment I am more interested in the slashes, because I'm pretty particular about how lines sit on the page. I don't abbreviate "yr" for "your"—I avoid shorthand almost everywhere. Most likely I did it here to fit the whole thing on one page, and possibly I will, in my future but your past, get a polite letter from my editor asking politely if we might adopt a similar strategy for other lyrics that run long. To this I will reply, just as politely: No, we might not. Charles Bronson rose from poverty most of us can't even contemplate to study under Strasberg. To him alone do I dedicate this song, slashes in its working draft and all."

"I have this abiding idea about the "pure" song, even knowing that all notions of purity are nonsense—but allowing the conceit for the moment: The pure song does not exist on the page, and exists only by default in the recorded artifact. The pure song can only exist in the air, where its phrases do and don't have punctuation: We hear the breath pauses and intuit commas, semicolons, question marks, et cetera, and share these momentary inflections in the space of the song, but that's the only space where the meaning of the song can be fixed. "Fixed" here is no less difficult than "pure"—can something be fixed if it's strictly temporal by definition? "Rotten Stinking Mouthpiece" describes the action of Indestructible Man, starring Lon Chaney Jr., a 1956 Hollywood curiosity mainly memorable for Chaney Jr.'s silence throughout most of the film—he's said to have been recovering from surgery, necessitating a rewrite of his character, a betrayed criminal who rises from the dead to seek revenge. As a song, it approaches my absurd standard for what constitutes "purity", valiantly resisting the siren call of the printed page, where its best effects—the drawn-out "hours", the "those two who/speak through you" quadruple rhyme, the breath-pauses in the chorus—simply vanish; and for this, I am exceedingly fond of it, and it holds, for me, a place of high privilege among all my songs."

"Henry McCarty was born in New York City in either September or November of 1859; his younger brother, Joseph, in 1863. When their father died, his mother, Catherine, moved, with her sons, to Indianapolis. There she met William Antrim; in 1870, they all moved together to Wichita. Antrim and McCarty were married three years later. By this time they resided in the New Mexico Territory, in Santa Fe. A year later, she contracted tuberculosis and died. William didn't stick around to see what would become of the kids.

In the short span of Henry's life he'd moved all the way across the country, and now he was an orphan. He's known as Billy the Kid in the popular imagination, and only one photograph of him survives, though a second disputed image surfaced in 2010. In any case, he did not live to see twenty-two. This song visits him for the second time in my catalog. Lots of us find trouble to get into when we are young. But few of us do so in such a way that our names live on forever, even when the known details of our lives are murky, and uncertain, and contradictory. Of those few, even fewer succeed in largely vanishing into the icon they've left behind."

the mountain goats, protein source of the future...now! (1999, ajax records)

"The piano in this one, recorded by Scott Solter at New York's Mission Sound, sounds unbelievably good; as a ballad of longing, I like the song, too. But there were already two piano ballads on the second side of All Eternals Deck, and both of them were more complex, lyrically and musically, and side two is where you have the luxury of complexity. On side one you bang the drum, and then on side two, as a reward, you get to complicate things. You know the phrase "I don't make the rules"? It doesn't apply here, because I made this rule."

"This was written for All Eternals Deck but is too pious to live there. The All Eternals Deck is thirteen face cards and all of them are people. This song is about God. There is no God card in the All Eternals Deck. Everybody knows this."

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

"Further exposition on the action of the game Odin Sphere (August 2). Much of the game takes place in Hell, really. In this sense, it's less a game than a philosophical essay."

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

"A song for Nancy Chavanothai, who was born in 1948 in Sibley, Iowa, and who died on the second day of October 2007, in Ventura, California, surrounded by the family she loved."

"The Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the golden toad are all extinct. People sometimes say they saw a Tasmanian tiger—in their yard, out in the bush, crossing a road. But the last footage of a known Tasmanian tiger was through the bars of the cage in which he died, more than a hundred years ago. You can watch that footage online if you like: It is hard to watch. Say whatever nice things you may about human beings, but the trail of destruction we leave in our wake is littered with blameless beings who were in our way."

"There are several Mountain Goats songs in which the narrator goes back to a house where he used to live, figures out a way to get inside, and then looks around in there, trying to establish some connection between the person he was when he lived there and the person he is now, elsewhere. My explanation for this theme is deeply esoteric and hermetic: It's because I have, on several occasions, gone back to a house where I used to live, figured out a way to get inside, and then looked around in there, trying to establish some connection between the person I was when I lived there and the person I am now, elsewhere, which is to say, here."

"Really, it's a simple song about how, when things are hard, you can locate a point or person in your past and fix your attention there, and then hold on for dear life. It is a hopeful song. But because I'm the guy writing it, I have, of course, set the action inside some nonspecific imperial Rome-like arena, where the narrator expects to be eaten by a wild animal as soon as he's done talking. It looks grim! But in the broader and more personal sense, this narrator seems still to not be done talking, so our wild animals will have to wait a while longer. One bright day, they will be fed, no doubt. But until then!"

"The physical scene being described here is from Black Sunday by Mario Bava (1960), but the song that grows out of these images is one of the most personal things I've ever written—about feeling ownership of my body and my self, about tending to and caring for the things within myself that are soft and good; about growth. It is, therefore, pretty opaque, because I don't have any artistic interest in just speaking these things out plainly. For me the magical transformative power is in the image, and in the transformation of idea into image. I haven't read Jung but I suspect thinking this process through is more his domain than mine. My job is to occasionally write songs where it happens, and to otherwise write songs whose tension resides in a kind of resistance to the whole process."