Rather than disappearing, you stay present and let people in on the evolution

brash and bratty and funny and chaotic and manic

never once came to see

Cities for stages.

my private broadway

It’s an American institution.

It was the last song to come into place. I wrote it in May 2020, a few months after the rest of the record, because I was spending a lot of time there. I actually wrote a guitar part and an audio guide to “The Ramble” but ended up taking out both because it felt too much like a directive. I wanted it to be a walk through the park with me but I wasn’t telling you where to go. You can just choose your own adventure.When I wrote the song, I was feeling very mournful but also watching nature creep up everywhere. I wanted it to have that energy of the dandelion that pops up between the cracks of the sidewalk. That quality of moving forward. Through a lot of tragedy, nature has its way.

The boys—now men—end the book gathered in the tree house, the lost kingdom of their youth: “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had been,” they say, “or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.” The boys might as well be calling for themselves; no one will ever answer.

And because nothing has died, nothing can truly live. When I was coming up, we would make albums out of the junk of the thrift store – use karaoke machines, and so on. There was something of a birth out of that death. But once this phone you’re recording our conversation on dies, it’s dead. You can’t reappropriate it. You can’t spin it. So it just creates more death. It’s a culture of death!

, but the real crux of the story is that he didn’t recognise himself in the reflection. Which I think is very symbolic for the way our culture’s played out, where we’re obsessed with this frontier, with getting somewhere as we get further and further from ourselves

an unknown hand.

There is no time to process during process. As Joni Mitchell sang, you’re just “living on nerves and feelings” before sensing you have done something. And you hope people will hear it. And hear you. And hear themselves. In the songs; I was the empty swimming pool. I was the coward who wanted an iron spine. I was the kid hiding under the bed from a predator. I was the televangelist selling lies but spreading hope. I was the ashtray with the stubbed out cigarette waiting to be cleared by the beleaguered late night bar staff. So were you. You were everything. I was just the same. But brand new. I wanted to be if not free, something just a little closer to it.

I felt like a fraud. I felt like people were frauds. I wanted to be hit. I wanted to hit.