Phoebe Bridgers 101

There are rarely more than a few truly great American songwriters working—let alone peaking—at any given moment. Phoebe Bridgers, now 31 years of age, is one of them: a true emo-folk maestro whose new album, Lost Weekend, is her best yet. When John Mayer first shared her music in 2017, he described “the arrival of a giant.” Conor Oberst called her a “singular songwriter,” and Taylor Swift said that Bridgers’ songs feel like a “precise memory.”

This is all true, and you knew it the first time you heard Phoebe Bridgers, really heard her. For me it was “Motion Sickness,” a folk rock song from her debut album that catalogues the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of Ryan Adams (more on that below). But the tone is distanced, ironic:

I hate you for what you did
And I miss you like a little kid
I faked it every time, but that’s alright
I can hardly feel anything, I hardly feel anything at all

“Motion Sickness,” released in 2017, made her famous overnight—but Phoebe had been at this for years. Growing up in the (lower) middle-class part of Pasadena, Bridgers spent all her free time making music. She played at the Battle of the Bands in high school, performed Taylor Swift covers at the farmer’s market, and took modeling gigs to pay for recording sessions.

In 2014, over a year out of high school, a friend took her to the PAX-AM studio, the analog hideout owned by indie country star Ryan Adams. Phoebe played a few songs for him, and he freaked out. His energy was manic, irresistible; he demanded she record an EP that very minute, and after spending the rest of the day in the studio they started dating immediately. Adams—then 39 years old—put on the full court press, telling Phoebe that he loved her, that they would go on tour together, and even suggesting they get married as soon as possible.

A few months later, Phoebe cut off the relationship, and Adams immediately lost interest in helping her out. The older man slow-rolled the release of her three-track Killer EP, eventually agreeing to put out a limited 7-inch vinyl press. Four years later, the New York Times would report that this was a pattern of predatory behavior towards young women that stretched back years for Adams; after the story broke, he was appropriately exiled from polite society.

Bridgers made the most of her Ryan Adams experience, chaotic and miserable as it was. The Killer vinyl became her calling card; she used it to earn some opener slots on tour with Julien Baker, and it got her in the room with producer Ethan Gruska, who would become her studio muse. She also wrote the aforementioned “Motion Sickness,” which served a dual purpose: it settled her score with a man she greatly disliked, and also defined the core Phoebe Bridgers product—she would deliver exquisitely crafted folk rock, packed with the kind of storyteller pathos that made her hero, Elliott Smith, a legend.

The Bridgers-Gruska sound that debuted on Stranger In The Alps (2017) includes close-mic’d and whispery vocals, re-recorded and layered à la Elliott, backed by a mixture of guitar and pedal steel, flecked with bits of electronic music and noise. Over the years, the electronica has come more to the foreground, and Bridgers has done more to play around with her voice—both expanding the range of her vocal performance and including more digital vocal effects to stretch it into weirder places.

After breaking out, Phoebe started the supergroup Boygenius with Lucy Dacus and tourmate pal Baker; she also recorded a concept album with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, under the name Better Oblivion Community Center (the two dated for some time, and he plays harmonica on the new album).

Next came Punisher, in 2020, widely regarded as a classic. The album served to expand her sound, adding more synths, strings, and even a shoegazey noise outro on “I Know The End.” With America stuck at home during the pandemic, Phoebe Bridgers became something closer to a household name—she earned a handful of Grammy nominations and started dating rising A-Lister Paul Mescal.

Six years went by without another solo album. She didn’t disappear, exactly—she opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras tour, won three Grammys with Boygenius, and traded her famous actor boyfriend for a famous comedian boyfriend (Bo Burnham). But fans like me had started to worry that she was destined to become another Frank Ocean: one of our best living songwriters no longer seemed particularly interested in writing songs.

Lost Weekend

Phoebe Bridgers has finally returned, and Lost Weekend is her most ambitious album yet. It’s a thematic extension of her previous work, mixing dry humor with crushing sadness and layering hyper-specific narrative detail into emo-girl tone poems. It leans harder into experimental folktronica than either of her first two projects; there is a glitchiness to the soundscape, and she plays around with weirder vocal effects.

The album is ghostly, reflected in the cover art; it is haunted by the spectre of her father, who died in 2022 after a decades-long struggle with alcohol abuse. But she also processes her broken-off relationship with Paul Mescal, and wryly asserts the romantic solidity of her current connection with Bo Burnham. It is the best music she has ever made, spanning nearly an hour over sixteen tracks.

P.S. — On at least three songs, the melody of “Graceland Too”—my favorite Phoebe Bridgers song—is sampled and/or interpolated. It’s stunning every time it shows up, and I love the way Bridgers is interacting with, and hallowing, her own best work.

Mourning songs

“The Outside”

“The Outside” is the album’s opening track; through vocoder, Bridgers slips in and out of blurry remembrance as she deliberately channels Imogen Heap.

Crying in a suit and tie
But you should see the other guy
One more time for old time’s sake
I’ll watch him get carried away

Fist through the drywall
I’m frozen in place
But not afraid

Bridgers is often drily funny, and here she’s at a funeral, looking awful, crying—the “other guy” you should see is her father, who is literally dead. Her MFA feel for the literalizing of idiom comes through here as well. “Carried away” means literally being carried away, but it also means losing control, and the listener is slipstreamed into a memory of Bridgers’ abusive father putting his fist through the wall. Lost Weekend lives at the intersection of tragedy and ironic detachment.

I dive into the crowd
And they never let me hit the ground
Way beyond the barricade
Ohio carried me away

Here the vocoder robotically coats the words Ohio carried me away, and the kinetic experience of crowdsurfing is made to sound like a medically-induced coma. She is being carried away from the stage, but also from life, from presence.

“Still Standing”

This is a brilliant, disturbing song, probably the darkest on the whole record. “Still Standing” is not an Elton John pick-me-up. Here the words refer to someone who is stuck in place during a terrible event.

You left your suitcase by the bed
Like you needed to know you could go whenever you wanted
And I’m out on my feet
But I am still standing

When a boxer is “out on his feet,” he is effectively knocked out but somehow standing upright. Here it is less about perseverance and more about dissociation during a traumatic event; the next stanza reveals where she is standing, and reveals that we are in a flashback.

At the top of the stairs, turning red
Pound for pound in a prom dress
You tried to make me afraid
We were both shining

Feeling indifferent, wearing black
Sometimes I want you back
But not today

She is again dissociated—always somewhere else, struck dumb by the chaos around her—“pound for pound,” another boxing metaphor, as her father tries to make her afraid. Then she’s back to the funeral, wearing black, grappling with the complex desire for her father’s death to be undone.

I found her bleeding over the sink
But when you said sorry, you were looking at me
I can’t remember what I said
But I didn’t mean it

Your back to the ocean, burning red
I can’t imagine you dead
But you are every day
Thank you for everything

Bridgers never explicitly positions her mother or her father as a boxer in this song, although they are the ones in the physical altercation. Instead it serves to create an atmosphere of violence, of injury. I’m haunted by these final lines, especially Thank you for everything—it isn’t clear to me where this lands between the twin poles of sincerity and sarcasm.

Processing relationships

“The Governor’s Waltz”

Phoebe Bridgers started dating Paul Mescal in 2020 after flirting with him publicly on Twitter. In November 2022, the Guardian reported that they were engaged to be married—a rumor that was unconfirmed until this very album, where she sings (on “Lost Weekend”) I’m supposed to be married but I called it off. They broke up before the calendar turned to 2023.

This song—a gorgeous bit of music that could pass for an Elliott Smith cover—seems to turn on a chance encounter with Mescal backstage at a music festival.

I was the belle of The Governor's Ball
Hiding in the bathroom like Shelley Duvall
You had a nosebleed, you were in my way
And you didn't remind me of anything

Being famous, the “belle of the ball,” at a music festival should be fun. But Phoebe quickly undermines her own self-image by comparing herself to the scream queen from The Shining, hiding in the bathroom. The encounter leads to a spiral, and she ends up doing an accounting of where their relationship went wrong.

Two kids in a trench coat living alone
I was too happy to feel at home
Dancing ourselves clean late New Year's Eve
You deserved better, you wanted me

The line references the Internet meme of “three kids in a trenchcoat,” pretending to be adults to get into a movie theater. She is using it to communicate an awareness, saying we were just pretending to be adults.

Of course, this is classically immature; what is the difference between pretending to be an adult and being an adult? But the center holds anyways, saved by her admission that Mescal deserved better—he wanted her, and nothing else matters. There is a beautiful production choice here, too; as the stanza ends, we hear a nightclub crowd in the distance chanting an NYE countdown.

Now, let’s see how far I can run without stopping
And she can pretend to be me
Since she took my place, in my bed on that stage
I have not lost any sleep
Being myself wasn’t easy
Do it for me

The closing lines of the song take a direct shot at Gracie Abrams, Mescal’s new girlfriend, who makes mid-tempo music that plays, more or less, like a generic-brand Phoebe Bridgers. “In my bed” means even more than the Mescal connection, because Abrams performed on tour from a bed adorned with rocketship-graphic sheets—the exact same ones that Bridgers had posted on Instagram years ago.

“The Governor’s Waltz” is the prettiest sounding diss track you’ll ever hear; it isn’t as poisonous as Tupac’s “Hit Em Up,” necessarily, but Phoebe isn’t pulling her punches either, and her target is well-defined.

The (sort of) happy songs

“Haunted”

In “Haunted,” Bridgers finds a pocket of optimism and makes a poppy bluegrass song that, were it slightly less hushed, might have been made by Amanda Shires or even KT Tunstall.

So I’m putting on my makeup
While they’re lighting the stage up
Just like candles in a cake

If you’re gonna make a wish, then
You better be specific
You’re gonna have to live it every day

I’m gonna put myself together
You can go or you can stay
I’m gonna put myself together either way

It’s still Phoebe Bridgers, so there’s a world-weary feeling that pervades this song. It is explicitly written from the perspective of I’m really fucking tired, but I still have to do my job. But the focus, ultimately, is on the strength and joy that one finds in doing that job, and doing it well. It reminds me of Taylor Swift’s sarcastic (and impeccable) paean to tour life, “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.”

“Bobby”

An upbeat indie rock banger about how much Phoebe Bridgers loves Bo Burnham—and because it's Phoebe Bridgers, “Bobby” is shot through with a streak of devastating and self-aware irony.

I saw you slow dancing alone in your room
And I wanted to buy you a new pair of shoes
Now you're walking around with my heart on your sleeve
And I am right here bleeding

So you followed me home like you'd done it before
And you had to bend over to get through the door
And if you didn't like either one of my friends
I'd kill them, I'd kill them

Phoebe saw her man on Netflix (Burnham’s Netflix special, Inside) and decided to reach out. It’s funny that she picked out Mescal in a similar way, developing a crush after watching his performance in Normal People. Being famous is really cool.

Meanwhile, the imagine of a man walking around with her heart on his sleeve—more literalization, and revamping, of idiom. And if he didn’t like either one of her friends (implying she only has two), she would kill them. This is drily anti-feminist, a note that Bridgers clearly delights in hitting.

Bobby, this could be the end of wanting
I exist only if you're watching

The end of wanting is a an ominous way to describe monogamy, reminiscent of David Berman’s mordant the end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting—which it to say it reminds me of death. As for existing only in the male gaze, I suspect that Bridgers finds the line very funny, and true in a painful sort of way.

The closing songs

“As Above”

The album’s penultimate song might be my favorite, because it strikes me as the most improvisational, something dreamed up and then executed in a flurry of creative energy. It starts with horror-movie piano and her signature talk-singing.

Trying not to look down
Making faces at a kid on the plane
Trying not to freak out about being a couple days late
Started watching a movie, one where they go back in time
And it got to me, I don't know why

Bridgers has discussed the way life as a famous person takes place on a series of airplanes, and “As Above” chronicles a particular bout of travel anxiety, cycling through cascading thoughts about her own parents, and the way she would handle having a child of her own.

I thought about Air Force One flying over Omaha
I thought about my mom driving herself to the hospital
I'm always looking for the exit
I've never been afraid of heights
Now I don't want to live forever
But I don't wanna die

There is a swift, free-associative sequencing to this panic that feels very relatable. We go from random (Air Force One) to traumatic (post-DV hospital visit) to personal flaws, and finally to personal truth: I don’t wanna die. Without warning we flow into the next stanza, as Phoebe speaks to her unborn child (calling back to her late period anxiety) as the reason why she wants to live.

Before I take you to Coney Island
Screaming on the Wonder Wheel
You're gonna take me for granted, but I can handle it
Whatever happens after, it doesn't matter

You won't have to believe in magic
Leave it to me, and I'll make it happen (x2)
You can't imagine
I can't imagine

This is so honest, so vivid. This is the magic of truly great indie songwriting—Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t write for the radio. She doesn’t even write for anyone that doesn’t already love Phoebe Bridgers. Because of this, she can commit to writing whatever the hell is on her mind.

She goes on a tremendous vocal run as the production gets noisier right around You’re gonna take me for granted, hinting at the Florence Welch ranges she is capable of reaching. There is a great deal of Sufjan Stevens (especially Javelin) in this song and this album, as she slowly builds from quiet to loud, from spare to lush.

As above, so below
As above, so below
As it was, so it goes

This song isn’t quite religious, but it plays like a real affirmation by the end. As above, so below; there is a harmony between the ground and the sky. So even when you’re way up there, panicking about your late period and traumatic childhood, take a deep breath—eventually you will touch down, and this too shall pass.

P.S. — She builds an entire song out of mantra elsewhere on this album; I get a real kick out of the simplistic “Never Going Back!”

“Lost Weekend (Reprise)”

He never made it a day in a shirt
He's not comin' back as a bird
He's not coming back
He's not coming back

The stanza begins with a specific memorial description of Bridgers’ father, transitions into a bracing rejection of spiritual belief, and finally into the crushing reality—when people die, they do not come back.

But I still live by the things he taught me
Like how to forgive when they're not sorry
And the government isn't tryna kill you
They just don't care if they kill you

There is something so sweet and therapeutic about this song. Your dad that never apologized for his abuse—even he can transmit a valuable message about the importance of forgiveness. And I especially love this little throwaway detail about the government. Phoebe’s dad wasn’t exactly Q Anon, apparently; he just didn’t trust the government. Like the rest of this song, the line is unvarnished and essentially perfect.

I am my old man’s oldest son
I fought the wall and the wall won
But if I ever come out of hiding
You won’t have to know how to find me again

Phoebe has always tended towards androgyny; she’s openly bisexual, used to wear her hair cropped, and wears a suit and tie more than most male musicians. So these lines are literal, in some sense—she is more like a son than other women might have been. But there is a metaphorical meaning, too. To be an “oldest son” is to bear a weight, to accept a responsibility for the family.

Fighting the “wall,” and the wall winning, is a funny riff on the Clash’s “I Fought The Law.” I’m not sure if it means anything else, and that’s fine. Words have vibes, they have a taste, they impart a synesthetic meaning—to fight the wall, to lose, this is about surrendering.

Now I can’t see any stars in the sky
When a dream comes true, a fantasy dies
But we’re gonna be alright, me and you
You love me and I won’t еver let you forget

Not yеt

The album’s closing stanza might be its best. The referenced dream is of her father’s death—in her hit song “Kyoto,” she sang that I’m gonna kill you, if you don’t beat me to it; dreaming through Tokyo skies. Now that he has died, the fantasy of reconciliation has been erased.

But this song is addressed to her partner, and she assures him that we’re gonna be alright, because he loves her—and she won’t allow him to forget it. And then, because this is Phoebe Bridgers we’re talking about, and because she is constantly aware of how fleeting love can be, not to mention life itself—she ends an album about ghosts on a note of impermanence: “not yet.”

I don’t listen to music like a normal person. Or maybe I do, because who’s to say what is and is not normal? Anyways, I tend to obsess over a few songs at a time. Maybe five songs at most. I will listen to only those songs for about two weeks, at which point I will start to find some new songs to get into the rotation. I thought it might be fun to check in on my current rotation.

“Your Deep Rest” — Hotelier

I have been on an emo kick recently, and Hotelier is taking the brunt of it these days. It’s got that self-obsessed moodiness that all great emo has, and this one scratches a post-hardcore itch too, with a loud-quiet crescendo and driving, heavy drums. There is melody to it, but the guitar ramps up into thick and distorted walls of sounds that blow out your speakers/headphones/eardrums. I think it’s delectable. Like Nirvana had a baby with The Fray. The chorus is emotive, hyper-personal, and beautiful:

I called in sick from your funeral
The sight of your body made me feel uncomfortable

Next time we get to the chorus, it’s changed a little:

I called in sick from your funeral
The sight of your family made me feel responsible

The final one is the most heartbreaking:

I called in sick from your funeral
Tradition of closure nearly felt impossible

Nothing like a slightly-altered earworm chorus to make me fall in love. I’m late to Hotelier, whose 2014 album Home, Like No Place Is There is widely regarded a classic of the “emo revival” movement. But I’m thrilled to have found them.

“The Law” — Leonard Cohen

“The Law” is a classic Cohen joint, performed with a wryly erotic affect. It comes from his wonderful, bizarre ‘80s era (see: “First We Take Manhattan”). Right away, he’s addressing a paramour:

How many times did you call me
And I knew it was late

Is this song about love? Maybe. There’s definitely some stuff about a breakup in here; Cohen says I’m going to miss you forever. Or is it about crime and punishment? Take the chorus:

There's a Law, there's an Arm, there's a Hand
There's a Law, there's an Arm, there's a Hand

While there is certainly punishment here, I don’t think that “crime” of the legal sort is at issue. The giveaway here is about there being an Arm, and a Hand. Cohen is singing—Cohen is almost always singing— about God, and whether he will be given divine punishment for shirking his duties as a lover.

The song is ambiguous, slippery. Cohen also sings here that I don’t claim to be guilty, guilty’s too grand. And later he seems to flip again, saying It wasn’t for nothing, that they put me away. Altogether it’s a grand kiss-off to a former partner, funneled through the familiar Cohen theme of Godly absolution. He covers some similar ground, more explicitly directed at his maker, in the later song “You Want It Darker.”

“Lost Boys” — Phoebe Bridgers

It’s been a million fucking years since Phoebe Bridgers released an album, or that’s what it feels like—in the half-decade since Punisher, no one this side of Jason Isbell has managed to top the writing in classics like “Graceland Too.”

I don’t think “Lost Boys” will top that song, or the other standouts from Punisher. But it is still extremely good, and it rewards closer attention. Produced by pop god Jack Antonoff, responsible for most of Taylor Swift and Lorde’s biggest hits—in addition to Lana Del Rey’s best album, and too much else to list here—the song plays in familiar Antonoff territory, burying synths and muted electronic drums underneath acoustic guitar and vocal layering. “Lost Boys” sounds like it could have been on Swift’s mega-album The Tortured Poets Department. NOT AN INSULT, BY THE WAY. PROBABLY MY FAVORITE TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM (HIGH PRAISE).

But the writing in “Lost Boys,” a song about dating the Peter Pans of the world, is pure Phoebe Bridgers and derivative of no one but herself.

On a motorbike, doing 90 in a 55
To another life where they make you cut your hair
Impatient with a rifle and your papers
Weightless but not scared

We start with a slice-of-life about a self-destructive young man, attempting to make something—something else—of his life. Later, she picks up the same narrative thread, and it’s inflected (?) with the Cold War:

That one time in East Berlin
When you threw a tantrum with a .57, and broke a rib
You told me you wish you were dead

I won’t pretend to know what, exactly she’s talking about. The point is that she’s created a character—in whatever era—that serves as a stand-in for the type of angry, unfulfilled and immature men that she likes to date (or can’t stop dating).

The chorus of the song is pretty direct in its meaning, at least, as Bridgers complains rather beautifully about Peter Pan Complexes her lovers tend to have:

Lost boys never grow up, never go home
Lost boys never spend their lunch money, yeah
Lost boys never give up, never get old
Lost boys, come find me, yeah

But the most interesting part of the song is the pre-chorus, a stunning little couplet that she intones twice:

This machine is killing me
I pretended it was make-believe

I saw some of her Gen Z fans on Reddit, speculating that “this machine” is late capitalism. Sure, that’s one incredibly trite and brain-poisoned way to understand it. Bridgers is certainly alive to the complications and indignities of modern life.

I think a stronger reading, if you want to go broad, would be to position “this machine” as the music industry. Although she has been on a solo-artist hiatus, Bridgers did achieve some measure of genuine stardom as a member of BoyGenius, the deeply non-essential supergroup (think dumb CSNY, or whispery Big Thief) she co-created with the less-talented Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus; the group went viral on queer-teen Tiktok repeatedly for inter-band romance, and opened for Taylor Swift during a long stretch of her world-conquering Eras Tour. Perhaps that experience soured her on the machine.

Or you could go even simpler on the reading; what if “this machine” is literally just her iPhone? The best line Phoebe Bridgers ever wrote came on her folk classic “Garden Song:”

And when I grow up, I'm gonna look up
From my phone and see my life

On that note, I should put my screens away. I’ll be back with more soon.

Conor Oberst 101

Wind it all the way back to 2003, when Conor Oberst, a kid from Omaha, Nebraska, moved to New York City on the strength of Bright Eyes’ breakthrough album LIFTED. At this point, Conor was an indie prodigy who played Letterman, sold some albums, and generated endlessly glowing critical reviews. He was on the rise but hadn’t reached the summit. Everything changed in January 2005, when Bright Eyes released I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (alongside Digital Ash In Digital Urn) and catapulted Oberst into genuine folk stardom. He opened for R.E.M., took the main stage at Coachella, played Leno, played Letterman again, Songwriter of the Year in Rolling Stone—you get the idea.

Conor Oberst would never be more famous than he was in 2005. He never pivoted towards the mainstream, never signed his life over to a major label. Instead he dabbled in other genres, lived like a boho king in the East Village, and toured relentlessly for his cultish fanbase. In 2010, he married Corina Escamilla.

Of course, there were cracks showing on the surface—or was it the foundation? Conor Oberst has struggled with alcohol addiction for most of his adult life, and the rockstar experience didn’t simplify this issue for him. His marriage was, by all accounts, a mess. Still—from the outside, at least—Conor Oberst had it pretty damn good until December 17th, 2013.

The day it all went wrong

That’s the day that a digital women’s magazine, xojane.com, published an article titled “IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Dated a Famous Rock Star & All I Got Was Punched in the Face.”

Now, bear with me. This article was not about Conor Oberst. It had nothing to do with him. But its comment section nearly ruined his life.

In the days immediately following publication of the xoJane article, “Joanie Faircloth” (nom de guerre) left a series of comments in which she alleged that Conor Oberst, the singer-songwriter and leader of the band Bright Eyes, raped her after a 2003 concert in Durham, North Carolina. She said that Oberst’s older brother was her high school English teacher, and that he brought her to the show as a “birthday gift” to his famous rockstar brother. The lurid claims made a splash right away, circulating on social media and reported on by outlets like Absolute Punk, Time, Buzzfeed and The Guardian.

On January 8th, 2014, Oberst’s publicist issued a full denial of the allegations. One month later, Oberst filed a libel lawsuit against his accuser. The lawsuit was aggressive, and extremely convincing: it included a detailed timeline of Oberst’s actions on the night of the 2003 concert, as well as factual evidence to counter Faircloth’s story. Oberst’s older brother was not a high school English teacher, and he didn’t bring Faircloth to the concert; in fact, he was on tour with Bright Eyes at the time. Further, the lawsuit raised evidence that the accuser had a history of Internet hoaxes, including a fictional boyfriend’s suicide and a made-up cancer recovery.

In mid-July of 2014, Faircloth signed a notarized affidavit that admitted the claims were “100% false,” and Oberst withdrew his lawsuit. His album Upside Down Mountain, released in May 2014, was almost completely overshadowed by the scandal, and a $200,000 publishing agreement was called off. New business opportunities and album sales dried up. He wasn’t at risk of going fully broke, but the finances of an indie artist—even one as successful as Conor Oberst—are more tenuous than most people know.

Oberst kept touring throughout the maelstrom, drinking hard and working harder. Through 2014 and most of 2015, with his marriage in disarray, Conor Oberst just kept playing shows, just kept drinking. His punk group Desaparecidos played a shaky set at the Underbelly in Jacksonville on October 27; after it ended, Oberst was immediately rushed to the hospital. The tour was canceled, and the press release cited laryngitis, anxiety, and exhaustion.

From a hospital bed in Jacksonville, Conor Oberst made an important decision: it was time to go home.

At the Mayo Clinic in Omaha, Oberst was diagnosed with severe hypertension, a common side effect of alcohol abuse. They also found a large, and benign, cyst in his brain. He was given meds for the blood pressure, “happy pills” (his words) for the anxiety, and—most importantly—orders to rest.

For at least a few weeks, Conor followed orders. He took his pills and slept in and hung out with his buddy Mike Mogis, who owns a house next door to Oberst’s in Fairacres. But eventually—inevitably, inexorably—he started to write songs again. By February of 2016, he was holed up at ARC Studios in Omaha with Mogis. Over the course of a feverish 48 hours, the two of them recorded 10 acoustic demos and sent them over to the label. That year, the demos—completely untouched—would be released as Ruminations, which would prove to be Conor Oberst’s magnum opus.

Is the album really that good?

In brief, the answer is:

• yes, of course

• I would never lie to you

• go listen to it

• pay attention to the lyrics (please)

• maybe have a glass of wine or an infused gummy bear first?

• if you love the songs, make sure to tell me

• if you don’t love the songs impossible

But to make a short story long: Ruminations is Dylanesque in its sound, with an intuitive and strained vocal approach layered over acoustic instrumentation and the occasional squealing harmonica. Lyrically, it’s all Conor Oberst—weepy, autofictive emo folk where the Self is made paramount and brought low at the same time. And about those lyrics, about those songs—let’s get into it.

“Counting Sheep” should have been the album’s first song, as Conor sets the scene with a brutally efficient summation of his condition and brainstate:

Early to bed, early to rise
Acting my age, waiting to die
Insulin shots, alkaline produce

Temperature’s cool, blood pressure’s fine
One-twenty-one over seventy-five
Scream if you want, no one can hear you

If you want to know about the dissolution of Conor Oberst’s marriage, if you’re as miserably nosy as me, I would recommend listening to “Gossamer Thin,” where a striking verse seems to describe what it is like, more or less, to be his wife—to be married to a famous, troubled indie musician. We start with the visage of his addiction:

Rings ‘round his eyes
Tracks down his arm
His fans are confused and his friends are alarmed

There is no evidence that Conor Oberst has ever been a needle-user in real life, but it’s an effective way to emphasize the extent of his addiction. Next we move on to romantic jealousy.

His wife doesn’t talk
Hates when he’s gone
Counts every skirt in his new entourage

The idea of his wife counting every skirt in his entourage is evocative, and painful. But Conor isn’t interested in making himself seem cool here; he has a thrilling capacity for self-interrogation, for satire.

And they’re all gossamer thin
Left of the dial, bohemians
And they dance tournament style
Twirl ‘round the room, curtsey and smile
And they sit at his feet, read poetry
Swoon with each word he speaks

In real life, the entourage of Conor Oberst would look something like this: a dozen people, maybe eight of them women, smoking cigarettes and drinking in a green room. All of them left-wing, all of them “gossamer thin”—a beautiful and descriptive bit of phrasing, deserving of its titular status. But in the world of “Gossamer Thin,” Conor imagines his posse of friends and maybe-hookups as a medieval retinue, dancing “tournament style,” twirling, swooning as he reads poetry like a benevolent liegelord from the 14th century.

And in case you were having too much fun, he offers this delightful bit of songwriter catechism, emo philosophy, suicidal ideation:

Cause the mind and the brain
Aren’t quite the same
But they both want out of this place

“Til St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out” has a case for Conor Oberst’s best song; it is inspired by a real dive bar called St. Dymphna’s that he used to frequent in his East Village alcoholic era.

Rise and shine, get out of bed
Get ready for the day
Get a coffee from the deli
And walk the riverbank

You might be forgiven for thinking, at this point, that this is a happy song about life in the city. But it kicks you in the face—punches you in the throat?—shortly thereafter.

And hide your shakes, and worried face
Just sit down in the back
Your friends got there ahead of you
And night is falling fast

There is a story here, a narrativized account of the alcoholic’s daily experience. The song is written from the perspective of Conor’s drinking buddies, who comfort him even as they drag him back down into the depths of addiction.

Oh, you don’t have to lie, say you’re alright
We’re just happy that you’re here
But if you yell and tell me to go to hell
Well at least you’d sound sincere
Oh, you know it’s all a spectacle

When you go to take a bow
You always did get nervous in a crowd
But if you need some company
I’ll gladly stick around
And we can keep drinking till St. Dymphna kicks us out

St. Dymphna is the patron saint of mental illness, so there is a resonance there. He elevates a little dive bar into a spiritually rehabilitative bacchanal, quicksand respite. There is something mythical going on here—I would love to hear this performed with flutes and lyre, nymphs and satyrs occupying the scene’s periphery. Maybe Joanna Newsom can cover it.

In “Barbary Coast,” we start with a little taste of story, as Oberst explains to his wife why he drinks—or how he starts drinking.

I might have a taste
‘Cause the first one’s free
And the checkout girls
Got a thing for me
And they’re both as sweet
As the day is long

This is what rationalization looks like. He only wants to “have a taste,” and the first one’s free. To the alcoholic mind, everything seems like a reason to drink. Even the harmless flirtation with the checkout girls seems to nudge him towards intoxication. There is the subtle intimation, too, of something erotic—an affair, or the sweet memory of affairs past—but we move on quickly, as Conor stops rationalizing and straight-up tells the truth.

I don’t wanna feel stuck, baby
I just wanna get drunk before noon

He sounds shaky and desperate, voice edging up towards falsetto as he sings “before noon,” and the effect is heartbreaking. Later in the song, Conor sings that he tried to lose himself in the primitive like John Muir, but it didn’t work. A striking thing to write, to perform, from your semi-rural Nebraskan home, from your rehabilitative stint away from the big city after a mental and physical breakdown. As for why it didn’t work—why the sobriety didn’t stick—his explanation is stunning:

‘Cause the modern world
Is a sight to see
It’s a stimulant
It’s pornography

It takes all my will
Not to turn it off

I read this as an emo-intellectual riff on Kiedis’ infamous lyrics from “Californication.” The modern world as stimulant, as pornography—sweeping, evocative, and most of all true.

The sequencing of Ruminations makes no sense, but in the streaming era I can pretend that “Next of Kin” is the last song on the album. This is the most directly autobiographical song on the album, but it begins with a narrative meditation on alienation.

In the first verse, written as a lucid dream, Conor imagines himself witnessing a deadly crash on the highway, after which he is tasked with reporting the death to next of kin.

I saw a crash on the interstate
It left a feeling I could not shake
Just a name in a database
That must be notified

It’s not a phone call I wanna make
A stranger answers, I hesitate
“Got some bad news that couldn’t wait
Are you sitting down?”

The only connective tissue between these verses is that word I used earlier, “alienation,” as he writes about the self-distancing experience of fame.

Get too drunk and you can’t perform
Something dies when a star is born
I spread my anger like Agent Orange
I was indiscriminate

Getting “too drunk” to perform has, unfortunately, been a semi-constant feature of Conor Oberst’s life since the very beginning. His longest-tenured fans have seen him visibly wasted onstage as much as anyone in history this side of Jim Morrison. And I find myself obsessing over that succinct, histrionic commentary on the vicissitudes of fame: something dies when a star is born.

Agent Orange was the toxic herbicide and defoliant that the US Army sprayed during the Vietnam War. It makes me think of an alcoholic’s bad breath, an alcoholic’s bad words, spittle flying alongside swear words and accusation and excuse.

Yeah, I met Lou Reed and Patti Smith
It didn’t make me feel different
I guess I lost all my innocence
Way too long ago

The blase directness of these lines set them apart; the idea of meeting your personal heroes, and realizing they didn’t make you “feel different,” is striking. And the admission of innocence lost, coming from a songwriter whose first live performance came at 12 years old, resonates.

Finally, the song—and in my headcanon, the album—ends with this wistful slice of life, something straight out of Raymond Carver.

She called my bluff and she won the fight
I ran outside in the hot twilight
I had a lighter that didn’t light
Well I know I shouldn’t smoke

Here Conor Oberst—or the narrator, or the narrator that is meant to remind you of Conor Oberst—is drunk, and retreats from a fight like a little boy. Tries to light his cigarette. Fails. Figures it’s better that way.

I was going, I was free to leave
Walking fast down the Bowery
Tears in my eyes so I couldn’t see
But I made my way back home

For a songwriter used to spending most of the year on tour, and the rest of the year surrounded by his “new entourage,” beset by fans and admirers at every turn, the solitude evinced in these lines is bracing.

Because of the album’s broader context, because Ruminations was written from his home studio in his hometown with his best friend, I am able to receive these lyrics as comforting. There is some relief, at least, in the idea of leaving the craziness behind. I choose to read these lines as cathartic, to think about the full-body exhalation that comes alongside the conceptual reality of having a home, of there being a place to which one can return when all seems lost.

Nearly a decade after Ruminations, Conor Oberst is still writing and releasing essential work—take a look at “Bas Jan Ader” if you need proof. His life continues to offer up the kind of chaos that informs great art; I have yet to write about his messy multi-year affair with Phoebe Bridgers, which generated at least one excellent album and five million Reddit posts.

But today I wanted to take a breather from the endless scroll of the modern world, and savor—luxuriate inside of—Ruminations. On this album, Conor Oberst approaches the trauma of his recent past with stark candor, alternating between weepy mania and a fragile sort of meditative peace. It feels right that these songs were written and recorded in isolation; they are properly stripped to the studs, completely bare of pretense.

Despite the heavy subject matter and graphic biographical context, Ruminations generally avoids the terminal despair of late-era David Berman or Townes Van Zandt. These songs do not give the impression of a man who has given up. They depict a brilliant writer actively processing his own life—weighing his habits against his desire to get better, his strengths against the flaws that hold him back. It is an album of deep and sustained thought. It is, like the title promises, an album full of Ruminations.

coming late to David Berman

David Berman was born in 1967 and released his debut album with the Silver Jews in 1994. He spent the next 25 years as an on-again, off-again cult hero; the makeup of the Jews would change repeatedly over the years, and Berman himself was a genuine recluse, deeply unsettled by the experience and performance of fame.

It was July 2019 when I first heard about Berman. After disbanding the Jews and embarking on a decade of self-imposed hermitude in Nashville—playing no shows, releasing no music, rarely accepting interview requests—Berman was back. He had a new band, having adopted the psychedelic rock outfit The Woods and turned them into the Purple Mountains. With Berman as the frontman and singer-songwriter—it should go without saying that David Berman was always in control of the words—the weirdo icon was primed to enter a late-career, halcyon era. His first singles were received with glowing praise from the Gen X music critic intelligentsia. While David Berman inhabited a niche world, he was also on top of it.

When Berman committed suicide shortly thereafter, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. I wrote a little piece about his passing for my blog at the time, but I was embarrassed by my own lateness; I didn’t want to overdo it, to make it seem like I was in the know for longer than I was. At the time I basically only knew his stuff with the Purple Mountains, which was easier on the ears than the Silver Jews.

It took me over a half-decade to return to Berman’s work in depth, and really explore his discography. Once I did—almost exactly one year ago, in January of 2025—I was immediately head over heels.

the songs, and their detours

Liking Berman—loving Berman, as I do—is about learning to appreciate the detours within songs, the ideas hidden inside of other ideas. Take “Slow Education,” a languid alt-country number with steel pedal guitar, a barely-there fleeting taste of a song, Biblical scope in its lyrics:

When God was young
He made the wind and the sun
And since then
It’s been a slow education

But then it’s like he has a better idea, or a different idea, or something more pressing that Berman has to get off his chest. He sings it sweetly, earnestly, lilting upwards:

And you got that one idea again
That one about dying

I love “Slow Education,” and listen to it often. The song is structured such that the suicidal lines are the ones you want to sing along to, the words you find yourself belting in the car. You find yourself singing at the top of your lungs that you got that one idea again. The one about dying.

Or you could look to "Punks In The Beerlight,” a driving and upbeat Strokesy garage-rock anthem, genuinely catchy, a goofy power-pop chorus about Punks in the beerlight, burnouts in love. But there’s depth—esoterica, at least—nested in this song, too. In the song’s first (and only) pre-chorus verse, Berman uses his best Lou Reed voice to layer foreboding over a series of bizarre leading questions:

So you wanna build an altar on a summer night?
You wanna smoke the gel off a fentanyl patch
Ain'tcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews

Has anyone ever written such a mysterious, alluring mixture of song lyrics? In the best Berman songs, the meanings are slippery, hard to grasp, but clearly there; he clearly means to say something. As I grow closer to his lyrics, as I study them in greater depth, the spiritual and theological elements rise to the surface.

was David Berman a Jewish artist?

Judaism is passed through matrilineal descent, and David Berman’s only Jewish parent was his father, whom he reviled. Despite this, Berman started to explore Judaism in 2003, after a suicide attempt and subsequent rehab stint for debilitating drug addiction. He started out attending synagogue on Saturdays because it was the only way he could gain permission to leave rehab.

One thing led to another, and Berman fell in with a Reform rabbi in Nashville who studied closely with him over the next few years, culminating in his 2006 conversion. That summer, Berman traveled to Israel with the Silver Jews to play a few shows and reconnect with his heritage; the trip was immortalized in a brief but charming lo-fi documentary. In 2008, Berman told The Jewish Chronicle that “Judaism is about making peace with life, so I felt as though I had given myself an answer.”

He was playing shows here and there, releasing music, and seemed more or less happy. But David Berman was a troubled guy, and neither Judaism nor sobriety could fix what ailed him. In 2009, he published a fairly manic letter announcing the disbanding of the Silver Jews; in it, he blamed his father, a political lobbyist, whom he termed “Dr. Evil,” an “exploiter” and “scoundrel.” Berman wrote that his father’s impact on the world was too dreadful to be overcome by a rock band. Things, it seemed, were starting to get dark again.

There’s a concept in Jewish mysticism (the Lurianic kabbalah, specifically) called tzimtzum, used to explain the cosmological birth of the physical world. The idea is that God had to withdraw from the world in order to create space for creation. This is not understood as an abandonment of the world, but conceptualized instead as representative of a cyclical, patterned spiritual arrangement. There is presence, and then absence, and then presence again. Light, darkness, light. If this idea interests you, I have about five million pages of the scholar Gershom Scholem for you to read.

In his essay “Reflections on Jewish Theology” (and elsewhere) Scholem theorizes that the literary world depicted by Franz Kafka is one defined by theologia negativa, negative theology—a world that had “lost the Revelation,” where God’s presence was felt only through its absence. Scholem termed this the “experience of modern man…for whom nothing has remained of God but the void.”By the end of his life, Berman had become disillusioned with his life as a Jew. He wrote on his blog:

There was no real place for me in Judaism. Maybe if there was I would’ve hung in there, but I was attracted to the social-justice aspects of Judaism, and I was attracted to the prophets…Part of it was also that Judaism is all about community…and where I live in Nashville, there’s just nothing there. The reform temples—the rabbis are like anchormen. There was just no community for me.

More than one music critic has taken this as evidence that Berman’s Judaism was superficial, just a shortlived phase of his life. Something to be treated as a footnote or character quirk. But this view is, I think, belied by David Berman’s actual body of work. See below:

• From the 1994 debut album, Starlite Walker, Berman slyly terms Jesus a “rebel Jew” who “died for you and your sins.”

• On “There Is a Place,” from 2005’s Tanglewood Numbers, Berman sings about seeing “God’s shadow on this world”—a reference to HaMakom, “The Place,” one of God’s names in the Hebrew Bible.

• “Punks in the Beerlight,” 2005 (see above).

• The song “What Is Not But Could Be If,” from 2008’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, is a Kabbalistic meditation on limitless potential (Ein Sof, or “no end,” the infinite God) vs. actual creation.

• “Margaritas at the Mall,” 2019 (see below).

If you only listen to one David Berman song, I would ask you to choose “Margaritas at the Mall.” The song has a warm and vibrant feel, fleshed out by buoyant organ and steel-pedal guitar. It is more straightforward-sounding than most Silver Jews songs, but lyrically it is extremely complex, and Berman’s most explicitly theological work, in which he articulates what it’s like to live inside the void of revelation described by Gershom Scholem.

Drawn up all my findings
And I warn you they are candid
My every day begins
With reminders I’ve been stranded on this
Planet where I’ve landed Beneath this gray as granite sky A place I wake up blushing like I’m ashamed to be alive

I love the idea of warning the listener as the song begins—these are not just lyrics, they are his findings, and they are candid. And what are those findings? We start with him speaking of isolation, of being “stranded” on the planet where he’s “landed;” the alienesque imagery reminds me of what Moses said in Exodus: I have been a stranger in a strange land.

How long can a world go on under such a subtle god?
How long can a world go on with no new word from God?
See the plod of the flawed individual looking for a nod from God
Trodding the sod of the visible with no new word from God

Here we find the song’s heart, and a bracing insight into the mind of Berman near the end of his life. Berman, the “flawed individual,” trudges through the visible world, receiving nothing from his God, not even the “nod” he would be willing to accept. He is overcome by theologia negativa; revelation withdrawn, God’s presence via absence.

The chorus of the song, where Berman sings about—what else—drinking margaritas at the mall, is a self-aware and ironic coming to terms with the reality of life in this spiritual vacuum. It’s been analyzed as a withering assessment of existence under late capitalism, and I suppose it’s that too, although I’m not quite Marxist enough to make the materiality central to my reading. Regardless, it’s the narrator throwing his hands up and saying, fuck it—might as well just drink some margaritas at the mall. The cheap and vacuous aesthetics of shopping mall cocktails only serves to underline the broader point.

When Purple Mountains was released in the summer of 2019, Berman seemed to be experiencing a powerful creative rebirth. The album was brilliant, praised by all the right people; a tour was in the works.

And then, in August of the same year, he killed himself.

the cycle cut short

I really don’t want to make the obvious metaphorical connection here. But it’s hard not to juxtapose these things when you think about “Margaritas at the Mall,” when you think about suicide. It’s hard not to think about the idea of God’s withdrawal from the physical world, his absence, and the way such a spiritual vacuum could have been too much for David Berman to handle.

But the truth is, David Berman tried to kill himself in 2003, he got better, and then he got worse. He was a sick man, in a very meaningful sense. It would be far too easy, too overdetermined—and, ultimately, too religious—to chalk his death up to God. Besides, he had managed to keep himself alive for the previous decade that he spent out of sight and out of mind. Closer to the real truth, and harder to bear as a fan: David Berman reentered the public eye as a recording artist, and killed himself shortly thereafter.

Whatever the ultimate cause of his tragic suicide, I hope that you are able to appreciate David Berman, or at least appreciate my appreciation for David Berman. He was a deeply Jewish artist, engaged with a spiritual life in a tradition of neurosis and doubt that stretches back to Woody Allen and Bob Dylan and Moses and Abraham.

I want to honor his Judaism as something more than an afterthought or left-behind religious dalliance. It is the lens through which his monumental art is best understood and treasured. For me, at least, it helps his work make sense. I am writing emotionally now, which I find embarrassing, but it’s not a put-on. I am so grateful that he fought it as long as he did; I am so grateful that he made the music he made.

Conor Oberst was born in 1980, in Omaha, Nebraska, and started writing songs as a twelve year-old; by the end of 1993, he had already self-released his debut album on cassette tape. This restless, prolific nature carried through his career, and he linked up with friends in various bands through the mid-90s, always writing and recording. In 1995, he formed the solo project Bright Eyes, which later added more band members.

My favorite album of Oberst’s is likely his Dylanesque project from 2016, Ruminations. But there’s a time and a place for deep cuts—today I want to dig into “Lua,” from late 2004, one of the most popular tracks that Bright Eyes ever released.

Oberst is known for his expansive compositions—the man loves a string section, loves a drum set—but “Lua” is an unadorned folk song: acoustic and spare with a simple, recursive melody, sung in a quavery emo register. It’s like Oberst was just crying, or plans to cry later; it might seem melodramatic if the writing wasn’t so perfect, if the song wasn’t so pretty.

I know that it is freezing but I think we have to walk
I keep waving at the taxis; they keep turning their lights off
But Julie knows a party at some actor’s west side loft
Supplies are endless in the evening; by the morning they’ll be gone.

“Lua” takes place over the course of one very long night, as the song’s narrator—clearly meant to be a stand-in for Oberst—goes from one party to the next with his paramour. Lesser writers treat the folk genre as an excuse to descend into genericism, but Oberst knows that emotion—and character—lives in detail.

There is a whole life, an entire person, packed into this stanza. Oberst is on a date, and it’s already going poorly. It’s too cold, and they can’t get a cab. But at least there’s a party they can go to, a party with supplies, and they’d better get a move on because by the morning they’ll be gone. This hints at the song’s true subject: addiction, and the dark, dull awareness that all highs have an attendant comedown.

And I know you have a heavy heart; I can feel it when we kiss
So many men stronger than me have thrown their backs out trying to lift it
But me I’m not a gamble you can count on me to split
The love I sell you in the evening, by the morning won’t exist.

Released in late 2004, “Lua” has a touch of the self-hating romantic fatalism that colored so much of that era’s emo music (Oberst’s relationship to, or distance from the “emo” genre is much-debated, and uninteresting to me). But there’s an impish brilliance to the way Oberst writes, a self-deprecating humor that undermines the pretense of seriousness.

The girl in question has a heavy heart, and much stronger men—Oberst making fun of his frail build—have thrown their backs out trying to lift it. It brings to mind the image of beefy young men, hingeing forward at the waist, trying to lift a heart like it’s a refrigerator. And much like the “supplies” at the party, the love he sells—his romantic attention—will dissipate come morning.

You’re looking skinny like a model with your eyes all painted black
You just keep going to the bathroom always say you’ll be right back
Well it takes one to know one, kid, I think you’ve got it bad
But what’s so easy in the evening, by the morning is such a drag

There is a kinship to Elliott Smith in this stanza, as Oberst calls out the addictive personality of his romantic counterpart—“Between The Bars,” but also the lesser-known “Twilight,” which I wrote about here.

Early-stage romance is built around recognition. The feeling that you see something in this person, that you understand something about them; something that you also understand about yourself. The sense that you might be able to build something on that shared consciousness.

Something akin to that goes on in “Lua,” but it’s not a love connection. Instead, Oberst recognizes an addictive kinship in his date. She’s skinny, with eyes painted black—indicating a certain edginess—and she’s always going to the bathroom, saying she’ll be right back. The implication is that she doesn’t come right back; that she’s doing drugs in the bathroom. The next line is the one that always breaks me: And it takes one to know one, kid, I think you’ve got it bad.

With these words, Oberst—an addict himself—communicates a bracing awareness. This guy knows all too well what it means to sneak off to the bathroom too often, to crave the release of substance abuse. We get the sense that he is further along in his addiction than his date. Worn down, perhaps, by the hard reality of life as an addict.

I’ve got a flask inside my pocket we can share it on the train
If you promise to stay conscious I will try and do the same
We might die from medication, but we sure killed all the pain
But what was normal in the evening, by the morning seems insane.

“Lua” begins with reference to “supplies,” which are endless at the start of the evening, but by the end of the song—which takes place on the subway at the brink of dawn—the drugs are gone, replaced by a flask to take the edge off.

At the beginning of the song, Oberst was an active participant in the evening—apologizing for the cold, trying to track down cabs, talking about a party, and noticing things about his date. By the end, however, his clarity has steadily sloped downwards; at this point he can’t even promise to stay awake, merely saying that if his date can stay conscious, he will try and do the same.

The spatial and temporal setting is meaningful, too. The train is a liminal space, one that you occupy only in the transition from one space to the next. And there is no time more liminal than the fleeting moments that distinguish night from day. This has philosophical weight in the context of “Lua,” where Oberst repeatedly reminds us that nothing will last: the drugs you take, the love you sell. All of it will be gone, or colored differently, by the morning.

And I’m not sure what the trouble was that started all of this
The reasons all have run away but the feeling never did
It’s not something I would recommend, but it is one way to live

Up until the song’s final stanza, “Lua” has an outward focus, with the lyrics largely written about and to his date that evening. Here he aims for direct autobiography, and the results are breathtaking. He admits that he can’t trace his addiction back to a specific trauma; his reasons for substance abuse have run away from him, leaving only the feeling. Only the urge. He doesn’t recommend this mode of existence, either. It’s just one way to live, among many others.

Conor Oberst has a long, unfortunate history of issues with substance abuse and alcohol addiction. But even if you didn’t know that, you could just listen to “Lua,” and you would have a pretty good idea. You would know that this song was written by someone who knows what it’s really like.

This was the first Bright Eyes song I ever heard, and it has remained a personal favorite over the intervening years. It is that one line, especially, that sticks in my head. Time and again I return to the simple, touching poetry: It takes one to know one kid, I think you got it bad.

All available evidence tells us that Conor Oberst doesn’t have it too bad these days. It is my sincerest wish that he is able to stay on the wagon, or least to stay healthy, and happy. His artistic gifts are too significant to be washed away by the tide of substance addiction, even if that trait has given him the piercing insights necessary to write a song as beautiful and touching as “Lua.”

what do we know about Sufjan Stevens?

It was a heady time in Detroit, summer of 1975, and John and Carrie Stevens were newly devout followers of a spiritual practice called Subud, created by an Indonesian man named Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, known to his adherents as Bapak. Subud did not prescribe any specific religion to its followers, allowing them to follow any denomination or God(s). They were only asked to meet weekly and partake in the latihan kejjiwan, a group spiritual exercise whereby Subud followers would “submit to the Divine” via spontaneous physical and vocal activity—something like the Pentecostals who “speak in tongues,” although it wasn’t quite glossolalia.

John and Carrie had recently changed their names to Rasjid and Hadjidjah on the guidance of Bapak, and when they gave birth to a baby boy on July 1st, 1975, they were told to name him Sufjan. Like I said, it was a heady time around then, and Rasjid—who kept his Subud name—and Carrie—who did not—moved on from Subud a year later. For Sufjan Stevens, one of the preeminent singer-songwriters of the 21st century, his name was the only remnant of Subud in his life. Carrie left the family a year later, and Sufjan was primarily raised by Rasjid and his stepmother Pat. From the ages of 5-8, he spent summers in Oregon with Carrie and her new partner, Lowell Brams. These summers would later be mined to great effect in his magnum opus Carrie and Lowell.

It’s not easy to put these facts together, to establish a clean chronology, because Sufjan Stevens has always disliked talking about himself. And unlike some artists—think Jason Isbell, maybe—the Sufjan Stevens discography does little to elucidate his biography. Much of his career has been spent writing oblique, esoteric music that transmits personal insight via cultural reference.

Carrie and Lowell was the most directly autobiographical album that Sufjan Stevens ever wrote. But it’s not exactly a comprehensive document, which makes sense in context: Sufjan wrote and produced Carrie and Lowell at 40 years old after his mother died, based largely on memories of childhood summers that took place over three decades ago. From toddler years to adulthood, Sufjan was raised by Rasjid and Pat. Their parenting makes up the bulk of his life. But he wrote only one autobiographical album, and that album covers a few summers with his absentee mother Carrie. As fans, we often imagine that we know our favorite artists. In the case of Sufjan Stevens, it seems we know very little.

On the sweetly devastating “4th of July,” in which Sufjan sings about the inevitability of death, he references a number of pet names shared between himself and his mother: my little Versailles, my little hawk, my little loon. In 2015, Sufjan told NPR that all of them were made up.

“That whole song, and the interactions and the affections, are all made up…we didn't have pet names, and we weren't intimate. Our relationship was distant because she mostly wasn't there. I was raised by my dad, my stepmom. I think that song is kind of an imagined parallel universe, in which we were more intimate…But that wasn't possible.”

In another interview with Pitchfork around the time of the album’s release, Sufjan speaks about the “mythology of Carrie;” this is an idea that came to mind when I decided that it was time to to write about the 2023 album Javelin.

what’s the deal with Javelin?

Although his longtime fans knew that Sufjan Stevens was gay, he didn’t publicly come out until the fall of 2023, in a lengthy Instagram post that came alongside the release of the album Javelin. In the post, Sufjan dedicated the album to his partner, Evans Richardson, who had recently died. He also revealed a diagnosis of Guillian-Barré syndrome, which left him temporarily paralyzed—he has since recovered.

In the context of Sufjan Stevens, who is famously private, and stingy with details of his personal life, this qualified as a torrent of information. For me it had the unfortunate effect of diminishing Javelin upon its release. I felt so bad for him that I struggled to process or even focus on the music itself.

Two years after its release, Javelin has started to cohere for me. It is a complex, heavy, and deeply religious album. It is clearly borne out of the death of Evans Richardson, but its music and lyrics demand a layered and complex reading. In covering a few songs in detail, I hope to draw some elusive answers out of Javelin.

the songs about loss

As the opening track of Javelin, the direct “Goodbye Evergreen” establishes the album’s subject matter and somber tone. The song begins as quiet acoustic folk and slowly builds into a crescendo of chamber pop, as Sufjan uses a cacophony of instruments and sound effects to create a so-called “wall of sound.” This is well-worn territory for him, sonically—there is “Chicago,” of course, but he does something similar with “America.”

Goodbye, evergreen
You know I love you
But everything heaven sent
Must burn out in the end
I promised you

Just as you were in my dream
Now let me off easy
And I'll slip down through the drain
To release my scattered brain, my enemy

While “Goodbye Evergreen” is “about” Evans Richardson, it clarifies that throughout Javelin, Sufjan will mostly be turning the camera on himself. Richardson is not given physical form in the album, nor is his name ever used—his absence is structuring with twofold effect:

1. To protect the privacy of Sufjan & Richardson.

2. To give Sufjan the space to expand his grief to histrionic, mythological size.

Something just isn't right
I cut from the inside
I'm frightened of the end
I'm drowning in my self-defense
Now punish me

Think of me as what you will
I grow like a cancer
I'm pressed out in the rain
Deliver me from the poison pain

Here Sufjan declaims on the terrifying, psychedelic nature of mourning. Something just isn’t right, and he cuts himself from the inside. But this song can’t be suicidal, really, because he sings insistently that he is frightened of the end. And then the killer line, the one that always gets me: I grow like a cancer, which Sufjan stretches into falsetto taffy.

This gets at the inwardly-focused nature of Javelin. This song is straightforwardly about saying goodbye to your dying boyfriend. But it’s also about the psychosomatic misery of that action, the way that the self can feel like something to rend, something to sacrifice.

As he begs to be delivered from the poison pain, the instrumentation really kicks in, and a wild vision comes to bear. Something like the end of Andy’s escape from prison in Shawshank Redemption.

The isolation of grief has always driven people to wallow; the sonics of “Goodbye Evergreen” suggest something grander, all-consuming. It establishes the mythologizing bent of Javelin, where Sufjan takes an intimate, private pain and blows it out to tremendous proportions.

Hello wildness, please forgive me now
For the heartache and the misery I create
Take my suffering as I take my vow
Wash me now, anoint me with that golden blade

Tie me to the final wooden stake
Burn my body, celebrate the afterglow
Wash away the summer sins I made
Watch me drift and watch me struggle, let me go

The tone of “Will Anybody Ever Love Me” is frantic, searching. It takes place in the manic post-trauma headspace, as Sufjan desperately wonders if anyone will ever love him again. The song is syllabically and melodically dense; Sufjan enunciates his way into a sort of “comma” effect on the vocal lines, so it sounds like: BURN my body, CELEbrate the, AFTERglow.

Sufjan is a sincere Christian—another track on this album, “Everything That Rises,” is straight-up praise music—which complicates my reading of this specific song, where Sufjan substitutes his own body for the flesh of Christ. He instructs “wilderness” to take my suffering, and prepares himself for sacrifice: he is washed by attendants, anointed with a golden blade, and tied to a burning raft. The imagery is disturbing and effective; it also strikes me as vaguely heretical. But I’m a lapsed Jew, so I don’t get to opine on that sort of thing.

Here Sufjan has again metastasized a private emotion to grand proportions, mythologizing his own experience of loss. The chorus is the song’s clear highlight, and it grounds us in the real world to tragic effect. Because in the real world, Sufjan Stevens did not undergo Christlike sacrifice on a floating pyre. In the real world, Sufjan Stevens is 50 years old, emotionally widowed, and wondering what—or who—comes next.

'Cause I really wanna know
Will anybody ever love me? (Love me)
For good reasons, without grievance
Not for sport (not for sport)

the song about…?

“So You Are Tired,” one of the finest songs Sufjan Stevens has ever written, is the most confusing component of Javelin. On my first several listens, its meaning seemed clear enough. Sufjan bids farewell once more to his lover; he tells him to rest your head, sings that he is tired as the sun.

This broke my heart, honestly. I imagined it to be a sort of folkie hospice song, a subtle paean to quality of life. A way for Sufjan to tell the ailling love of his life that it is time to let go; that it’s okay to admit you are tired; that it’s okay to admit you are ready to die. Isn’t that a nice idea?

I think so, but it isn’t supported by a closer look at the lyrics.

So you are tired of us
So rest your head
Turning back 14 years
Of what I did and said

So you are breathing disaster
I did what I was told
But I was a man born invisible
Was it something I said or some kind of joke?

You see what I’m getting at, right? This song is not addressed to a dying partner—these are breakup lyrics, sang from the perspective of the recently-dumped. Here Sufjan takes a begging, desperate tone, arguing that he only did what I was told. He is on his figurative knees, performing the role of a jilted lover. We have all had that painful, stabbing thought—was it something I said?

So you are dreaming of after
Was it really all just for fun?
I was the man still in love with you
When I already knew it was done

More breakup lyrics—Sufjan imagines that that his partner has already moved on, and he wonders why, wonders how it went so wrong. How are we to make narrative sense of this, in the context of Javelin? What’s going on here?

Maybe I’m overcomplicating this. It’s not like every song on Javelin has to be factually accurate; as covered in the introductory section, Sufjan has largely avoided autobiography in his songwriting. Maybe “So You Are Tired” is just a breakup song that happened to make it onto the album.

But I don’t think that is likely. “So You Are Tired” shares meaningful thematic DNA with the rest of Javelin; like every other song on the album, it is heavily freighted with the spectre of death.

So you are tired of me
So rest your head
Turning back all that we had in our life
While I return to death

You see the thematic cohesion here, right? Even if this song is “about” a breakup, it is also about death—Sufjan tells the subject of his song to rest your head, to move on from all that we had in our life, and in the same breath he suggests that he will return to death. This doesn’t feel out of place on Javelin. While the mood ranges from the religiously ecstatic (“Everything That Rises”) to the elegiac (“Javelin”), death and its impacts are the connective thread by which Javelin hangs together.

what does it all mean?

Throughout Javelin, Sufjan Stevens expresses an intense and frequently morbid desire for self-punishment, and occasionally self-obliteration. He wants to transform the pain he feels into something tangible. A song like “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” makes this desire explicit—through the imagined ritual of crucifixion (or something analogous), he expands and makes literal the qualia of grief.

This is the common thread: if only the mental could be made physical, Sufjan Stevens might be able to process the death of Evans Richardson. And make no mistake, Javelin is about something that happened to Sufjan Stevens, this is an album that a songwriter wrote about himself. That's not to say that this is the work of an egoist—Sufjan is generous with his empathy, and there are no rules when it comes to processing the death of loved ones.

Let’s take a second to juxtapose Javelin with Carrie and Lowell. The latter offers far more direct description of, and commentary about, its late subject. That subject being Sufjan’s mother, Carrie—a woman he barely knew, a borderline stranger. Then flip back to Javelin, an album about Evans Richardson that runs spare on information, a deliberately abstruse piece of work about a man whom Sufjan knew on a detailed and intimate level.

That might seem backwards. But in the case of Sufjan Stevens, the obsessively private artist who has held himself back even while sharing reams of emotionally resonant songs—it makes perfect sense. He honors Evans Richardson by keeping his actual identity—everything but his name, really—to himself, carefully guarding the memories of the man he loved. In this way he distinguishes Javelin from Carrie and Lowell, and pulls off a brilliantly reimagined, enlivened take on the form of the tribute album.

In Part 2, we cover the actual song—the long, warbly “Miss My Dogs.”

the song itself

It is in this context that Young Thug, one of the most important and artistically daring rappers of the last 25 years, decided that it was time to address the drama. He did so with a seven minute track released on Twitter, titled “Man I Miss My Dogs.”

“Man I Miss My Dogs” is unlike anything Young Thug has ever released. The song is produced by his in-house producer London On Da Track, and the beat itself is fairly unexceptional trap fare. But the actual bulk of “Man I Miss My Dogs” is made up of Young Thug on Autotune, sing-rapping in lengthy verses about each and every one of his conflicts.

Historically, Thug has been defined by his lyrical irreverence and herky-jerky approach to rapping; the way he would switch topics and flows within the space of a few bars, yelping and crooning his way into brilliant pockets of instinctive melody. In the early days, Thug primarily practiced the “punch-in” style of recording, wherein the rap “verse” is stitched together from little bites of vocal input from the studio session—as opposed to the unbroken flow of bars that a more traditional artist like Jay-Z puts down on the track.

On “Man I Miss My Dogs,” Thug sounds sober for perhaps the first time in his career. It’s still a weird song, and Thug is still a weird guy. I used the word “savant” earlier, and it still applies here; there’s almost a Daniel Johnston-esque vibe of brilliant amateurishness that pervades the Thug discography. But there’s a coherence to the song, a sense that he wanted to get out these specific verses. And given the context, it isn’t hard to see why.

Apology 1: Mariah The Scientist

Baby, I'm sorry
One of my biggest fears is losin' you to the internet
Wakin' up in our bed with you right by my neck
Sayin', "Don't you break a sweat"

Look at these niggas bashin' me like Jesus 'cause I made it
Look at all this shit we've been through, baby cryin' in Mercedes

Fuck a jail call, I was playin', I'd never trade you
You was encouragin' me on my bad days
You pick the kids up, despite me bein' away
That's why every day you wake up, I'm tryna make you happy

Here, Thug offers something like a mea culpa to his girlfriend for cheating on her, although it is hilariously self-centered and ducks all accountability. Thug doesn’t fear losing his girlfriend as a result of his actions—but losing her to the Internet. He even positions himself as Christlike for being made fun of on Twitter.

I'm sorry for bein' a part of these hoes laughin' at you
I'm sorry for takin' you from who had you
Just to put you through this madness, I'm the reason you crashin'
How the hell you go to jail for me being bad?
I'm the reason they bashin' you, damn

As the verse ends, Thug finally locates the source of his subject’s pain: public humiliation, a crime so heinous that rabbis in the Talmudic era equated its moral impact to murder. He comes across as sincere and unvarnished here. He doesn’t exactly promise to be faithful, but he regrets his actions, regrets their impact. For Young Thug, that’s progress.

Apology 2: Drake

Drake—who has toed the line between supportive collaborator and culture vulture for nearly two decades now—was one of the first major artists to collaborate with Young Thug, on the 2016 track “Sacrifices.” Over the years, they continued to work together and speak fondly of one another. When Thug was released from prison in 2024, Drake flew to Atlanta with a million dollars cash to celebrate his homecoming.

Thug uses this verse to clarify his love for Drake, and to stake out his pro-Drizzy position in the (apparently neverending) Kendrick-Drake beef. He also specifically makes efforts, and references past efforts, to help Drake, Future, and Metro Boomin’ reconciliate.

Drizzy, you my brother
You know I ain't goin' against you, I got manners
Everythin' you did for the rap community, can't ban you
Never diss you, came to visit me at Cobb County like my kin do

Fuck the jail call, you know the other calls we had
Tryna get you, Metro, and Pluto on the same page
The internet don't know about it because real niggas don't say

For rap fans who like to follow along with background drama and industry beef, this song is catnip, as Thug makes the subjects of his songs very clear.

We had our own differences, but Cash came through and got us on the phone
Like why you and Cash beefin', nigga, he got us on the phone
He pulled up to my home
Ever since y'all niggas' differences, it never passed dawn

Here Thug references past issues with Drake, issues that were apparently mediated by Amir Esmalian, or “Cash XO,” the Weeknd’s manager. This is probably Thug’s most evocative lyrical moment on the song: “it never passed dawn” is a narrow and compelling way to describe an ongoing emotional darkness.

Apology 3: Lil Baby

Apologizing to Drake is one thing; Thug has reason to expect that such a verse will be received favorably in OVO country. But writing and performing a verse about Lil Baby—known as “Wham—” is a little trickier. Lil Baby is also from Atlanta, also from the streets, and even has his own rap label/entourage that borders on a gang, 4PF. He vociferously spoke out against Gunna, dissing him the instant news of his plea deal hit; in recent weeks he has distanced himself from his friend and mentor Young Thug, cutting him off entirely.

Wham, pick up the phone, yeah, talk to me, it's Spider
Taught you everythin' you know about this shit, we for lifers
God told you in the bible, the devil will knife you
Rats already winnin', don't let this shit divide us

Thug references a shared history, begs for a phone call, asserts emotional privilege: this is just as romantic as anything Thug sings to Mariah The Scientist. He sounds desperate to reconcile with his old friend. He really did teach Baby everything they knew; when they met in 2017, Baby was just a street kid hustling dice games in Atlanta. Thug saw something in him, and personally paid him thousands of dollars to stay off the streets while he learned to rap.

Apology 4: Future

In the context of Atlanta rap music, Future is basically Jay-Z: an unassailable icon, afforded immense critical respect burnished by his long-running commercial dominance. He and Young Thug were natural creative partners from the start, and their collaborative track “Relationship” remains one of Thug’s most popular songs.

Man, I miss my dog
Sittin' down and havin' talks with me, nigga
Walkin' me through this life shit, you deserve an apology
Standin' right beside you and you was right beside me
I don't gotta speak on your name, they know astrology

Future is known as “Pluto,” hence the line about “astrology.” This is the closest he gets to misdirection in this song—overall the rapping is direct and plaintive, all in service of communicating a very specific message.

See you to yourself 'cause I know Scooter got you sad
I know what you told me, nigga, keep KB beside me
RIP to Street, yeah, juggin' been inside of me
You don't gotta talk about him, I know how you feel you cried to me
If he was livin' right now, he'd tell you to call Thug

This is so emotionally naked that it almost makes me uncomfortable to listen to as a third party to the Future-Young Thug relationship. Thug references the death of Young Scooter (also known as “Street”), Future’s first label signee and close friend, who died under grey-area circumstances while running from police in Atlanta. He calls on this trauma and leverages it to urge Future to go ahead and give him a call.

Apology 5: 21 Savage

In the shortest verse on “I Miss All My Dogs,” Future thanks 21 Savage for his support and generally pays him a bunch of compliments. The most interesting bit of the verse comes when he references their shared attempts to end various rap beefs:

Like how I got you and Wham on the phone to settle differences
You tried to get me and Lucci on the phone, plenty
Like how I got Pluto and Drizzy on another mission
It might not even work out, but at least I could say I did it

Here Thug describes helping Savage and Lil Baby make up, suggests that he has recently attempted to do the same with Drake and Future, and mentions that Savage made efforts to have Thug and YFN Lucci reconcile. This is eyebrow-raising because Thug and Lucci’s beef was intense and long-running; at least three murders have been linked to their conflict. This provides some interesting context to the social world of rappers, which appears to be filled with more intercenine conflict and intersecting loyalties than an SEC sorority house.

Apology 6: Gucci Mane

When Thug was still just a skinny kid wearing weird clothes and dropping incoherent mixtapes, local operator Peewee Longway recommended him to Gucci Mane—the “East Atlanta Santa,” the godfather of trap music in Atlanta— and Gucci gave him 25k cash and a record deal off the strength of the intro alone. Over the years they remained close, and this verse mostly functions as a tribute to Gucci Mane, an attempt to solidify their bond.

Man, I miss my dog
1017, this shit for life
Me and you against the world, we back to back plenty nights
Nigga, you know you ain't soft
And you didn't raise a rat

Gucci is infamous for his realness, having come up in an era when every rapper was also a drug dealer, or “trapper—” hence, of course, trap music. Here Thug pays tribute to Gucci, and attempts to cite Gucci’s legend to actually defend his own solidness. It’s like—I came up under Gucci. How could I be a rat?

Nigga, Guwop word law
I think Jeezy'll tell you that
Nigga, please I'm not a rat
But that cheese where it's at
All the niggas on the case that didn't take pleas, that is that

At the peak of Gucci’s mid-aughts beef with Young Jeezy, Gucci shot and killed one of Jeezy’s associates during a home invasion, later dumping his body in the woods next a local middle school. Thug again uses his rap liegelord’s credibility to burnish his own here. It’s also the closest he comes to referencing Gunna—a line that Young Thug, who is currently on a fifteen-year probation and not allowed to make violent threats, needs to skirt carefully.

Apology 7: Family

Young Thug has 10 siblings, 6 kids, and a massive host of cousins and friends. To close out “I Miss All My Dogs,” he puts it all out there, apologizing to his parents and once again outlining his perceived vulnerability.

Mama, I'm sorry
Daddy, I'm sorry
For tryna to make them get it
When then they don't understand me
Made some mistakes, now the game tryna ban me

This makes for a fitting sign-off to the most sincere, direct song that Young Thug has ever written. It underlines some thorny questions about his future as a rapper: where does he go from here?

in conclusion

The rap zeitgeist has never been in a stranger place. Drake still makes hits, but everyone hates him. Kendrick’s last hit was built around the allegation that Drake is a pedophile. Future and Lil Baby and 21 Savage are still famous, they can still sell concert tickets, but they haven’t had a breakout hit in quite some time. Don’t even get me started on Travis Scott—at this point he’s basically a cover artist, imitating Travis Scott.

Perhaps the only model for genuine commercial+critical appeal lies in the body and mind of Playboi Carti, the reclusive, vampiric, androgynous punk-adjacent rapper who buries staccato, anti-melodic utterations inside discordant, rage-filled beats built to make warehouse walls crumble. But Carti is doing his own thing; whatever you think it, it’s organically weird, and copying organic weirdness only ever ends in failure.

Maybe we already reached Peak Young Thug. Maybe it’s over. Rappers age quickly, and at 34 years old he may have lost the capacity to define, let alone control, the hip hop zeitgeist. While I love this song, as evidenced by writing a million words about it, it doesn’t suggest a clear creative path forward for him.

On the other hand, this is one of the most fascinating and artistically vibrant rap artists of my generation. He singlehandedly broke new ground in the genre, made dozens if not hundreds of great songs, and demonstrated a boundlessly creative intellect. So I wouldn’t—I won’t—bet against him.

P.S.

If you like this sort of heart-on-your-sleeve celebrity apology song, I recommend the Akon track “Sorry, Put The Blame on Me,” recorded after allegations that he had danced inappropriately onstage with a teenage girl during a nightclub performance.

In this piece and the shortly forthcoming sequel, I detour briefly from my usual focus to provide some history and insight to Young Thug, one of the most interesting rap artists of the millennium.

After that we will be back to our scheduled programming, with a review of Sufjan Stevens’ latest album.

necessary background on Young Thug

When Jeffrey Lamar Williams, better known as “Young Thug,” first came to my attention, it was 2014 and his rap name seemed like a joke—a moniker so generic, it couldn’t be real. All I knew was that Gucci Mane, the godfather of Atlanta trap music, had ordained him as the next big thing. Then “Stoner” came out, an irreverent and fleeting but somewhat hypnotic trap song; it was when his second breakout hit, “Danny Glover” dropped, that I knew something was different about this guy.

I tend to write about lyrics, but it’s impossible to understand Young Thug without listening to him. I’m not saying you’ll like it, necessarily—but would you judge Picasso with a blindfold on? At his best, Thug melds a savant-like sense of earworm melody with clever wordplay and a number of different flows. His lyrics lean to the absurd, sometimes you can’t tell what he’s saying, and yet almost every song is remarkably catchy.

From the beginning, Thug’s gangster-rap music persona was both elucidated and bizarrely undermined by his way of life. He played with guns, and hung out with gangbangers (more on that later); he also wore dresses, called his best friends “hubby,” and consumed untold amounts of hard drugs. You can think of him like an unholy amalgamation of Morrison, Bowie, and Eazy-E.

the RICO trial, and “rats”

As is sometimes the case with street rappers, Thug didn’t exactly leave the streets behind when he started rapping. He stayed in Atlanta, where all his friends were, and as his bank account grew, his circle of street friends kept carrying guns, kept dealing drugs. In 2015, when Thug got into a beef with his idol Lil Wayne over the name of his album Barter 6 (originally meant to be Carter 6 as a “tribute” to Wayne), his friend PeeWee Roscoe fired several rounds from an assault rifle into the side of Wayne’s tour bus.

Over time, as Young Thug elevated into a household name, earning a #1 hit with Camila Cabello and reaching rap-god status in Atlanta, he started his own record label, YSL Records. Thug’s ear for talent was already well-known; he was partially responsible for career of new rap star Lil Baby, a local Atlanta kid that Thug personally financed and mentored when he was just getting started.

As vanity rapper labels go, YSL was pretty successful. It was mostly a way for Thug to give features and money to his friends and family members; they released a few compilation albums that didn’t make much noise. But there was one very big exception: Gunna, the fashion-oriented rapper who sounded just like Young Thug, with a little more polish and a little less chao. Gunna was a massive coup for YSL, releasing multiple #1 albums after breaking out in 2018 via the release of a collaborative album with Lil Baby.

The other thing about YSL, if you ask the DA’s office in Fulton County, Georgia, is that they were a “criminal street gang” responsible for drug dealing, robberies, and multiple murders. The politically-minded Fulton DA, Fani Willis, came after YSL with a 56-count RICO indictment, naming Young Thug as the gang’s criminal leader alongside 26 co-conspirators.

Under the RICO statute, developed to take down mobsters, leaders of criminal enterprises are responsible for the actions of their members. There was YSL slang, YSL tattoos; many texts and lyrics that made it sound like a gang. In 2015, a man named Donovan Thomas Jr. was killed in a drive-by shooting. The rental car used in the murder was rented under the name of Jeffrey Lamar Williams.

I don’t really think that Young Thug was the leader of a criminal enterprises, legal definitions aside. He was a guy from a bad neighborhood, with friends from the same place, and those friends stuck together. It is likely that some of his friends were very bad people, and committed numerous crimes. But Fani Willis wanted to put him in jail for life, more or less—and again, this a guy who has never once been convicted of a violent crime. The RICO statute was created for stuff like Rudy Giulani going after John Gotti, leader of the Gambino clan. Not Young Thug.

The criminal trial against YSL and Young Thug kept him in Fulton County Jail for two and a half years; during that time, his trial became an absolute circus. At one point, his attorney Brian Steele was held in contempt of the court. Steele immediately requested to be placed in a cell with his client, becoming an internet legend overnight.

In the course of the trial, one major theme emerged: the concept of “rats,” referring to those who turn state’s witness to mitigate criminal punishment. Of course, the question of “rats”—the importance of not being one, the willingness to kill them—has long been a feature of rap culture. But the YSL trial took this to a new level, most of the noise surrounding Sergio Giavanni Kitchens—better known as Gunna, the second most important member of YSL.

Although Gunna wasn’t accused of involvement with serious criminal activity, he was still swept up in the RICO indictment due to his closeness to Thug and YSL associations. After seven months in prison, Gunna reached an Alford plea (where the defendant maintains their innocence, but admits a guilty verdict would likely be found) for a single count of racketeering, and was released on time served and 500 hours of community service.

The Internet, buoyed by angry missives from Young Thug himself and various mediaries, turned on Gunna with a fury. Popular subreddits like r/atlantaology and r/hiphopheads ran with the narrative that Gunna was a rat, proclaiming him a disloyal bootlicker who sold out his best friend and rap mentor for a deal from the feds. Most prominently, Lil Baby—one of the most popular rappers in the world, and widely seen as a paragon of streets-first authenticity—publicly dissociated himself from Gunna, telling Charlemagne the God that they didn’t have a relationship and dissing him in multiple songs.

The reality is that Gunna didn’t snitch on Young Thug, not in a way that meaningfully affected his case. His attorney Steve Sadow has repeatedly clarified that Gunna did not cooperate in any meaningful way with the federal investigation. Generally speaking, Alford pleas cannot be used in court against other defendants.

But the Internet was stuck on this narrative, and so was Young Thug—even after being released from prison on October 31, 2024 after pleading guilty to gang, drug and gun charges. Just 10 days after his release, he Tweeted about the issue.

the jailhouse leaks, and is Young Thug a rat?

The culture welcomed Young Thug back with open arms at first. But over the last few weeks, things started to shift in the other direction. Someone leaked a two-hour video from 2015 that featured Young Thug in a police station, talking to officers about the aforementioned Lil Wayne tour bus shooting. In the video Thug directly names PeeWee Roscoe, the associate who shot the tour bus up.

The Internet was once again set on fire; there’s nothing people love more than pointing out hypocrisy. Was Young Thug, of all people, a snitch? The truth is, it shouldn’t really matter. The omerta of street life has always been a fantasy, a delusion. This is what The Sopranos was about, after all.

But the Young Thug leaks didn’t stop there. Over the past two weeks, an absolute torrent of phone call recordings have been leaked from Thug’s time in prison. These calls include:

• Thug flirting with a woman who is not his girlfriend, R&B singer Mariah The Scientist

• Thug criticizing Gunna to fellow Atlanta rapper 21 Savage

• Thug talking to his team about a forthcoming album release and asking if they can drum up some fake streams to juice the numbers

• Thug complaining about Kendrick Lamar’s denial of a request for a feature on his album

• Thug calling female rapper Glorilla ugly, saying he “would not pursue her at all”

• Thug saying no one likes J. Cole’s music

• Thug casting aspersions on Atlanta rap mogul Future’s parenting, and complaining that he won’t perform at a “Free Young Thug” concert

Taken on their own, maybe none of these calls would be that big of a deal. But the data-dump nature of all these mini-scandals, in combination with newfound “rat” allegations, did serious damage to Young Thug’s Q rating in hip hop. This was a guy who built a significant portion of his persona on being solid, on not ratting—and now it seemed he was a bigger rat than Gunna, the younger rapper that Thug turned into Public Enemy #1. The fact that PeeWee Roscoe himself defended Thug didn’t seem to matter in the court of public opinion.

What’s more, Thug seemed to have tanked his relationship with his biggest allies in rap music—Lil Baby, Drake, and Future.

the fractured era of rap beef

Even if you’re living under a literal rock, you are likely aware that Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s long-simmering beef erupted into fireworks last year. Kendrick released a series of brutal diss tracks, each containing various heinous allegations: he called Drake an absentee father, a bad son, a culture vulture, and most famously a pedophile—over and over again. Importantly, the beef was kicked off with a Kendrick track produced by super-producer Metro Boomin’ that featured Future, a longtime Drake associate and collaborator. The battle lines were drawn, and almost the entire rap industry positioned themselves against Drake.

So when Young Thug exited prison, the rap game as he knew it no longer existed. His longtime supporter and elderstateman, Drake, was now persona non grata in the culture. His biggest recording artist, Gunna, was now his sworn enemy. About five months after his release, he started to officially tease the release of an album titled UY Scuti; the project has seen repeated delays. And then came the double whammy of the “rat” leak from 2015, combined with the jailhouse recordings. Young Thug was suddenly under fire, surrounded on all sides by a voracious rumor mill and friends turned to foes.

in part 2, we will analyze Thug’s latest song—where he addresses all the drama and apologizes to just about everyone he knows.

Even if you know nothing about Wilco, it’s very likely that you know a few of their songs. Wilco classics like “Jesus, Etc.” and “Heavy Metal Drummer” have made their way into literally thousands of playlists with names like chill indie and rock music for studying.

But the actual art of Jeff Tweedy is worthy of a great deal more than algorithmic stereotyping. Today I would like to take a look at “Via Chicago,” my favorite Wilco track, which is from Summerteeth, widely regarded as a classic.

As is so often the case with classic albums, the recording of Summerteeth—released in March of 1999—was a mess. The first two albums, A.M. and Being There, were moderately successful alt-country projects heavily influenced by Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy’s previous band. Neither album did well enough to break Wilco out of the “adult alternative” genre, and the band toured constantly to keep the bills paid.

Jeff Tweedy, unfortunately, didn’t take very well to life on the road. He felt distanced from his wife and son, heavily abused pills, and entered a strange, virtuosic creative state. Previously, Tweedy’s songwriting process had been music-first. Now he became a ravenous consumer of classic literature, reading Miller, Gass, and Fante.

The biggest change was the introduction of Pro Tools, a digital recording technology that Tweedy and bandmember Jay Bennett used to overdub every track on the album. Bennett himself, who would eventually be booted from the band in a chaotic breakup in 2004, is an obsessive tinkerer and multi-instrumentalist who was doing plenty of drugs himself at the time. His encyclopedic knowledge of production technique played an important role in helping Tweedy bring about the psychedelic pop experiments of Summerteeth.

Before Summerteeth, Wilco always recorded live. But this time around Tweedy and Bennett undertook a more meticulous, more insular process, one that effectively minimized the contributions of bass guitarist John Stirrat and drummer Ken Coomer. Coomer, in particular, was ticked off:

“…John and I felt left out. It was Jeff and Jay feeding off each other…there was a bonding going on, and it didn't just involve music. Jeff didn't go into rehab but he should've…Jay was taking painkillers, antidepressants…There wasn't really a band, just two guys losing their minds in the studio.”

It’s easy enough to feel sympathy for the frozen-out band members of Wilco around this time. But Summerteeth is a classic for a reason; its infusion of noise, discordant atmospherics, and orchestral scale to the Wilco sound has stood the test of time. This is an album that sounds, at various times, like early Lou Reed, or Pet Sounds, or Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.

“Via Chicago” is a remarkable feat of production. It starts out like so many Wilco songs: Jeff Tweedy’s plaintively whined vocals over acoustic guitar. But the song builds over the next few minutes, as drums and piano layer into the sound. A little more than halfway through “Via Chicago,” we descend into sonic chaos as the vocals and instruments became heavily distorted. Tweedy has said that he wanted the distorted guitars to sound like you were standing beneath the L Train in Chicago.

Lyrically, the song is bizarre, but ultimately—I think—sweet and almost comforting. It has been referred to as a “murder ballad” because of the way it begins:

I dreamed about killing you again last night
And it felt alright to me

This sort of thing is all over Summerteeth; Tweedy explicitly works out some very dark thoughts about his marriage on the album. But the rest of this opening stanza makes it very clear that this song does not qualify as a “murder ballad” in any real sense. (If you want to hear a murder ballad, check out “Kate McCannon” by Colter Wall.) Because right from here, we go into a surreal set of images, which underline Tweedy’s suggestion that he has only “dreamed about” killing his wife.

Dying on the banks of
Embarcadero skies
I sat and watched you bleed
Buried you alive in a fireworks display
Raining down on me
Your cold, hot blood ran away from me
To the sea

The song as a whole is wrought with lofty prose. This is the type of thing that doesn’t work for most songwriters, who think that literary impact lies in the extensive exploration of facile metaphors (see: Mumford & Sons, “The Cave”). But Tweedy matches the entropic production of “Via Chicago” with a freewheeling, imagistic approach to the lyric-writing; we never stay with a symbol too long, and the whole thing feels anchored poignantly by his real-life experience as a rock star struggling with addiction and a marriage on the rocks.

I know I'll make it back
One of these days and turn on your TV
To watch a man with a face like mine
Being chased down a busy street

The idea of Tweedy’s subject seeing Tweedy—or a man with a face like mine, because Tweedy cannot locate or define himself so easily—on TV is simple enough. But we soon realize this is not a positive thing, because in this paranoid vision, Tweedy is being chased down a busy street, beset by a mob of fans? Addictions? Bad memories? But there’s somewhere safe he can go, somewhere he can return.

When he gets caught I won't get up
And I won't go to sleep
I'm coming home, I'm coming home
Via Chicago

The song’s final, hyper-syllabized verse features Tweedy’s most bizarre, experimental prose, as he brilliantly fashions something like a sound poem, starting with an image of his kitchen at home and moving into a strange space where semantic meaning doesn’t exist—or doesn’t matter.

Where the cups are cracked and hooked
Above the sink
They make me think
Crumbling ladder tears don't fall

They shine down your shoulders
Crawling is screw faster lash
I blow it with kisses

Rest my head on a pillowy star
And a cracked door moon
Says I haven't gone too far

I mentioned that I find this song comforting. And maybe that’s weird, maybe that’s a me thing. But the song returns throughout to one constant lyrical motif: coming home, via Chicago. Through all the misery, through all the paranoia, one thing is able to cut through the emotional distortion rendered sonically. The idea of returning to the place you belong.

The song’s ending feels like the clearest elucidation of its thesis, a thesis that perhaps Jeff Tweedy—tweaked out on pills and creative obsessions, separated from his family—could not yet appreciate. The belief that no matter how far you travel from home, no matter how hard you work to alienate yourself from the people and the place that you love, you can always come home, via Chicago.

I'm coming home
I'm coming home
I'm coming home
Via Chicago

P.S.

My analysis of this song is complicated by the fact that Tweedy does not write “to Chicago,” but rather “via Chicago.” On a basic semantic level, this seems to mediate or distance the narrator from his eventual home. It positions Chicago as a waypoint, a layover. Perhaps this is because Jeff Tweedy is from Belleville, a smaller town 4.5 hours from Chicago. Or perhaps “via” functions as an intentional redirection, a signpost to let us know that this narrator will never truly be home.

Like most great writing, “Via Chicago” is complex, layered, and ultimately ambiguous in its meaning. But I hope you have found something insightful here—this is one of the best songs ever written, and a clear highlight in Tweedy’s staggering ouevre.

the life and death of TVZ

The legendary Townes Van Zandt played his first show in 1965 at the Jester Lounge in Houston. By the end of the '60s, as Townes started to develop a reputation as the creative vanguard of country music, he was also developing a nasty addiction to the bottle. Along with his heroin habit, the alcoholism waxed and waned—but mostly waxed—over the years. In 1982, Townes was drinking a a full bottle of vodka a day.

At the tail end of 1988, Townes went sober and started working the program. He lasted a year before he started drinking again, harder than ever. By 1996, as the end of his life neared, the slim-bodied Texan had three decades of severe substance addiction to his name. Townes’ body began to give out; on December 19th, 1996, he fell down the stairs and broke his hip.

After weeks of refusing to see a doctor—Townes knew he couldn’t drink under medical supervision—Townes’ family and friends dragged him to the hospital, where he underwent multiple hip surgeries. That morning, Townes began to suffer delirium tremens in withdrawal, his whole body shaking feverishly. Jeanne checked him out against doctor’s orders, and handed him a flask in the car.

Back home in Smyrna, Tennessee, Townes sipped on vodka, shared a joint with his buddy Jim Calvin, and took some Tylenol PM. All in attendance agreed that he was lucid, in high spirits. Later that night Townes would suffer cardiac arrythmia, and die in the company of family and friends on the evening of January 1st, 1997.

This is all a little heavy, but it would feel weird to keep things light when writing about “Marie,” which is one of Townes’ finest—and darkest—efforts.

the song TVZ wrote about a movie (but really about himself)

“Marie” found its genesis in Buffalo, New York, where Townes went to stay with his tour manager Harold Eggers for an extended spell in 1993. One night Eggers rented the 1987 film Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson as Depression-era vagrant alcoholics with a romantic past.

Ironweed is a weepy melodrama that bombed at the box office and received mixed reviews from critics. But something about the film spoke to Townes; Eggers says that his addict-genius friend was moved to tears by Ironweed, and remained withdrawn and silent for the rest of the evening.

The next morning, Townes emerged from his bedroom with the lyrics to “Marie,” a spare fingerpicked ballad hat has no chorus; its verse-verse-verse structure has a propulsive, spiraling effect that mirrors the miserable, beat-down life of its main character and narrator.

I stood in line and left my name
Took about six hours or so
Well, the man just grinned like it was all a game
Said they'd let me know

I put in my time till the Pocono line
Shut down two years ago
I was staying at the mission till I met Marie
Now I can't stay there no more

“Marie” is written from the perspective of a homeless man, and it begins with him in the unemployment line. Six hours, just to leave your name. And the man in charge of the jobs—the man who holds all the power—grins like it’s a game.

The next stanza slips us into reverie, as Townes’ narrator remembers his last job, working on the Pocono line. Now he’s homeless, and hasn’t had a place to sleep since he paired up with Marie—most shelters are single-sex.

Fella 'cross town said he's lookin' for a man
To move some old cars around
Maybe me and Marie could find a burned-out van
And do a little settlin' down

Aw, but I'm just dreamin', I ain't got no ride
And the junkyard's a pretty good ways
That job's about a half week old besides
It'd be gone now anyway

I used the word reverie earlier, and this is a concept that strikes me as the key to understanding “Marie.” Its narrator is the type of man who loses himself in thought, who allows the mental world to assert primacy over the physical. This was not a new idea for Townes; look to “Pancho & Lefty,” when Pancho leaves his mother for a life on the road:

She began to cry when you said goodbye
And sank into your dreams

The dreams that we see in “Marie” are hauntingly small-scale. The narrator’s life is so bad that he imagines getting his hands on a burned-out van, just so Marie could sleep a little better at night. And the obstacles that get in the way are minor, too. There’s work to be had, but it’s across town, and besides—the job was offered a few days ago, and maybe someone else took it. These are the thoughts of a man who has, for all intents and purposes, given up.

The Pocono's down, but the Chesapeake's running
Two freights everyday
If it was just me, I'd be headed south
But Marie can't catch no train

She's got some pain and she thinks it's a baby
Says we gotta wait and see
In my heart, I know it's a little boy
Hope he don't end up like me

Take note of the way this information is delivered and processed. Marie’s pregnancy is framed first as an inconvenience; it is the reason Townes’ narrator' can’t hop a train and head south for the winter. But is Marie pregnant? She’s got “some pain,” and she thinks it’s a baby.

He assumes Marie is pregnant, because that’s the worst-case scenario. And then he takes it a step further, worrying that the baby will be a boy cursed with terrible genetics. This is a nasty mixture of ego and pessimism—everything is terrible, and it all revolves around me.

Marie she didn't wake up this morning
She didn't even try
She just rolled over and went to heaven
My little boy safe inside

Although “Marie” is grim throughout, the song takes on a truly disturbing character at its close. Our narrator seems to blame Marie for her own death, suggesting that she “didn’t even try” to wake up. We are left to wonder if he tried to wake her up. And the death of their hypothetical child is rendered in a positive light; he is “safe” inside Marie’s womb, even in death.

To Townes’ narrator here—and to Townes himself, I think, near the end of his life—death before birth would seem like a gift. A release from all the inevitable pain that would follow.

I laid them in the sun where somebody'd find them
Caught a Chesapeake on the fly
Marie will know I'm headed South
So's to meet me by and by

Ah Marie will know I'm headed south
So to meet me by and by

Townes’ narrator must know that Marie is dead. After all, he just moved her body. But as he hops onto the Chesapeake and continues his life on the road, Townes sings that Marie will know I’m headed South…So’s to meet me by and by.

Maybe I’m imagining it. But if you listen to the live version of “Marie” that I threw in that Spotify playlist, rewind these final lines as you listen. Tell me if you can hear a little warmth creeping into Townes’ weary vocals as he evinces this wistful, hopeless fantasy: Marie will know I’m headed South…So’s to meet me by and by.

what “Marie” is about

For all his flaws, Townes Van Zandt was extremely self-aware. I often think of an interview snipped from the posthumous Be Here To Love Me:

“I don't envision a very long life for myself. Like, I think my life will run out before my... work does, you know? I've designed it that way”

By 1993, as he neared 50 years old, Townes Van Zandt must have known the end was near. His songs from this era are almost unanimously pitch-black—if “Marie” didn’t make you feel bad enough, cue up “A Song For.”

While the film Ironweed inspired its writing, the subject of “Marie” is ultimately Townes Van Zandt. The song is about a listless vagrant, a good-for-nothing dreamer who finds himself repeatedly set back and overwhelmed by the material reality of life on the road. It is impossible to miss the TVZ self-portraiture here: the outlaw country star who toured all his life, who knew he was an addict, who knew he was difficult to love. We know that he knew; it’s all over the songs. And “Marie—” despite its fictional content and filmic inspiration—strikes me as one of the most honest, personal songs that Townes Van Zandt ever wrote.

When Warren Zevon started writing and recording in earnest in the mid-70s, the Eagles were the undisputed kings of popular rock music, offering polished and straight-forward songs with sing-along melodies and good—or at least fun—vibes. Zevon’s catalogue, most of it conceived and produced in Southern California, can be read as a direct reaction to this brand of music, as he infused an off-kilter intellectualism and darkness into the songwriting zeitgeist. His greatest impact came as an influence to others—Zevon is an important precursor to Silver Jews, REM, and Counting Crows, among too many others to list here.

One of Zevon’s most well-known songs, “Carmelita” is a delicious study in contrast. Jackson Browne (who produced and generally shepherded the first two Zevon LPs) layered mandolin and accordion into the track over fingerpicked flamenco guitar to evoke a border-town cantina vibe that plays well in the context of the song’s content—“Carmelita” is sung from the perspective of a low-down opiate addict, and directed towards his titular lover. The song sounds sunny, it sounds bright. In fact, it almost sounds like an Eagles song. But the lyrics are all Zevon. Densely arranged, very funny, and undercut with a punishing darkness straight out of crime fiction.

I hear Mariachi static on my radio
And the tubes they glow in the dark
And I'm there with her in Ensenada
And I'm here in Echo Park

Carmelita hold me tighter
I think I'm sinking down
And I'm all strung out on heroin
On the outskirts of town

The song’s deliberate tonal contrast is evoked lyrically in the first stanza, as Zevon speaks not of Mariachi music, but Mariachi “static,” blistering softly through his radio set. 50 years ago, cheap radio sets used vacuum tubes to function, and they emitted a soft red glow at night. This nearly surreal language establishes a solitary, late-night setting. It smacks of 10$ motel rooms, the type of place you go because the cops wouldn’t let you sleep under the highway. It’s the type of place you dream of Carmelita, out there in Ensenada—but you’re stuck in Echo Park, a run-down (back then, at least) corner of East LA.

The chorus of Carmelita is a show-stopper, built in a lab for karaoke, perfect for belting. The song’s narrator is singing to someone who isn’t there, someone he longs for, someone he lost, someone he doesn’t deserve in his strung-out state. Carmelita is something far off in the distance, something to hope for, something to wish on.

Well, I'm sittin' here playing solitaire
With my pearl-handled deck
The county won't give me no more methadone
And they cut off your welfare check

Carmelita hold me tighter
I think I'm sinking down
And I'm all strung out on heroin
On the outskirts of town

Well, I pawned my Smith Corona
And I went to meet my man
He hangs out down on Alvarado Street
By the Pioneer chicken stand

The autobiographical detail here is the narrator’s “pearl-handled deck,” an oddly luxurious item for an Echo Park heroin addict to own. To me it suggests a connection to Zevon’s own experience as a successful singer-songwriter who repeatedly tanked his own career and personal relationships due to debilitating alcoholism. Even if he wasn’t a heroin addict, Warren Zevon likely spent more than a few nights in a motel nursing self-inflicted wounds and wishing he was somewhere else.

The “Smith Corona” lyric functions as a clever bit of painful autobiography; Zevon was a severe alcoholic who repeatedly undermined his own career and life (and marriage) with blackouts and abusive behavior. In context, the idea of Warren Zevon selling his typewriter to fund a substance addiction is poignant, funny, and intensely self-critical.

As for “Carmelita” herself, a closer look at this song makes me skeptical that she is a real person. The closest we get to confirmation that Carmelita exists is the narrator’s mournful declaration that "they cut off your welfare check.” While this is a tidy narrative detail—Zevon was masterfully succinct as a writer—it doesn’t really track with the rest of the song. Carmelita is in Ensenada, right?

In the mid-1970s, Ensenada—a coastal city in Baja California—was a city on the rise, newly appealing to surfers and SoCal vacationers due to the 1973 completion of the Mexican Federal Highway. In “Carmelita,” the narrator draws a strong distinction between where he is (Echo Park), and where he wishes he was (Ensenada). In the context of the song, this little beach town is elevated to the City on a Hill, a magical place where the narrator could be free, and happy, and in love.

This geographic dichotomy further underlines my sense that “Carmelita” isn’t a love song at all. The subject of the song is either an imaginary woman, or a woman who is so long gone that she might as well be imaginary. It’s a song about loneliness, a song about the miserable reality of substance-induced solitude. A song about the seemingly endless period of time that stretches out like saltwater taffy between the last buzz and the next one.

Earlier this week, I covered some codeine-curious songs from early Americana.

“Codeine” (2011)

The popular narrative that surrounds Jason Isbell is tidy: kicked out of the Drive-By Truckers in 2007, struggled with alcoholism for the next five years, quit drinking, married Amanda Shires, and reemerged with the showstopping Americana classic Southeastern in 2013.

It’s a compelling story, but it elides important details and a handful of essential songs. Southeastern deserves its reputation as the definitive Isbell album, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. I am especially fond of “Codeine,” from the 2011 project Here We Rest, which holds up nearly fifteen years later as a creative peak.

“Codeine” is a country waltz, and Isbell on lead guitar and vocals is backed up by a second guitar, bass, piano, fiddle, and some dude absolutely tearing the room up on accordion. The song has a real upbeat, honky-tonk vibe to it, a change of pace from Isbell’s typical tendency to somber acoustic folk or straight-up Southern rock.

If there's one thing I can't stand
It's this bar and this cover band
Trying to fake their way through 'Castles Made of Sand'.
That's one thing I can't stand.

If there's one thing I can't take
It's the sound that a woman makes
About five seconds after her heart begins to break
That's one thing I can't take.

She should be home by now but she ain't.
I should've gone by now but I cain't.
One of my friends has taken her in and given her codeine.
One of my friends has taken her in and given her codeine.

In the first verse, Isbell establishes his narrator as a barfly—a standard framework for his songwriting of this era (see “Streetlights,” “Elephant”). The song takes place post-breakup, but the narrator’s role in the split is ambiguous. He found himself dreading her moment of heartbreak, which suggests some control over the situation. His line about "the sound that a woman makes" is one of the finest he ever wrote; it conjures a heartbroken whimper, or an initial sob, or whatever the listener's memory bank supplies.

Darlin' I'm not one to judge
But if I was then I'd say you don't look so good.
Got no answers of my own
But with you gone, this place looks bigger than it should.

If I call when I ain't drunk
This old boat'll still be sunk

'Cause one of my friends has taken her in and given her codeine
'Cause one of my friends has taken her in and given her codeine

In “Codeine,” Isbell gives us a funny, bracing look at the whirlwind of life in active addiction, as a drunken barfly pointlessly mourns the end of a trailer-park romance. The story never really goes anywhere; it has no arc, because narrative arcs require main characters with agency. And the narrator here isn’t the type to actually try and fix his life up. He’s more inclined to drink—and complain.

Codeine itself, the song’s centerpiece, is elevated to mythical status and framed as the reason that Isbell’s narrator can’t get his girlfriend back. This isn’t true, of course, and doesn’t reflect the reality of codeine, which is a low-grade painkiller unlikely to ruin anyone’s life.

Unlike Buffy Sainte-Marie’s melodramatic, D.A.R.E.-style song “Cod’ine,” Isbe’ll’s “Codeine” is deliberately funny. The drug itself is beside the point; it’s a stand-in for the narrator’s cuckolding at the hands of his supposed friend.

“Codeine Dream” (2017)

Colter Wall is a Canadian singer-songwriter with the most gravelly, gorgeous country baritone the Lord ever handed out. Born into the upper middle-class as the son of a powerful Saskatchewan politician, Wall started to record and release music while he attended college near home. A few songs broke through, and then a few more, and before long he was a country music star.

Much like his musical idol Townes Van Zandt, Colter Wall seems to have built his adult life in deliberate contrast to his upbringing. After achieving success, he purchased a large ranch property near his hometown of Swift Current, where he works, works hard, as a hands-on yearling rancher in between musical projects.

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“Codeine Dream,” from his self-titled 2017 release, is one of Wall’s best songs. It provides a dark and self-serious counterpoint to Isbell’s punchy “Codeine;” this is heavy country songwriting. It is a grimly arranged acoustic ballad, with Wall delivering his full-throated vocals over a simple fingerpicked chord progression.

The song is produced by Nashville maestro Dave Cobb (to whom Prine and Isbell both owe a great debt), and he engineers a theatrical atmosphere; Wall is accompanied by the occasional whines of a Dobro resonator guitar (the effect is similar to lap-steel), and a light drum or bassline disappears just as soon as it arrives.

Prayin' on the north wind to lead me to my door
Thumbing through my greenbacks, swearin' I made more
Some cruel nightly cycle leaves me cryin' on a motel floor
But I don't cry for you anymore

For many a dark hour, I look up to the sky
Many unkind thoughts are laid on my hazy eyes
Sometimes I get to thinkin', "why wait around to die?"
But I don't think of you, so I get by

The main character here is a blue collar addict, maybe an oil rig roughneck or a traveling linesman. Someone who counts their money at the end of the day, someone who sleeps in a motel. He’s in a dark place, drinking or drugging himself to sleep unsuccessfully; hounded by insomnia and heartbreak, Colter Wall’s “Codeine Dream” narrator considers suicide.

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Every day it seems
My whole damn life's just a codeine dream
I don't dream of you
Anymore

While he is clearly influenced by Townes Van Zandt—he’s covered him, more than once—there’s a reason that Colter Wall conversations always come around to The Man In Black. We haven’t really heard a voice like this since Cash, and the chorus of “Codeine Dream” is the perfect showcase for his gravelly range.

He goes a little higher, louder, really stretches the words out, as the instruments fade out and his vocals take center stage. My whole damn life’s just a codeine dream, he sings, and it’s impossible not to believe him. We are made to feel like hearing this song, hearing from this narrator, is a miracle; we feel that he had to battle through a thicket of bad habits, tear apart the walls of his drug-addled fugue state, just to bring us these words, just to tell us that his life absolutely sucks.

“Codeine Dream,” like the other songs I have covered here, abstracts heavily from the actual reality of the drug codeine. But while the narrator in Colter Wall’s song finds himself in a terrible place, he never suggests that the substances are the source of his pain. They are a distraction from the pain. There’s even a hint of philosophical skepticism in Colter Wall’s “Codeine Dream.” If your whole damn life’s just a codeine dream, is any of it real?

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Also of Note: Zach Bryan, Trampled By Turtles

I would be remiss not to mention two other recent (and relevant) tracks: “Codeine” by Trampled By Turtles (2015), and “Codeine Pills” by Zach Bryan (2020). The TBT song is right in their wheelhouse, a high-tempo bluegrass banger that verges on punk rock despite its country instrumentation. The entire song is a riff on “Waitin’ Around to Die,” centered around a vague, post-breakup setting with a narrator who has made a new “friend” in codeine, and—just like Townes—thinks that friend is the nicest thing he’s seen.

The Zach Bryan song, on the other hand, is more of a straight-up country throwback, in line with the rest of his early-career output: “Codeine Pills” offers a simple, percussive, hard-strumming guitar melody to back up Bryan’s wordy, rowdy, and intuitive lyricism.

Every time you come to town, we wind up doin' the same thing
Gettin' high and runnin' around, the blame you tend on placin'
And are you happy now Anita now that you're finally free
When you said that you were leavin' and only comin' back for me

Cheap booze and codeine pills ain't worth all the losin'
Nothin' can come between us, damn a life worth choosin'
Cheap booze and codeine pills ain't worth all the losin'
Nothin' can come between us, damn a life worth choosin'

To Conclude

It’s a little strange that so many folk and country songs have been recorded on the subject of codeine, given the drug’s relatively low strength and frequency of abuse. Given what the opioid crisis in America actually looks like, you would expect these kinds of songs to be more commonly written about heroin, or oxycontin.

I believe we can chalk this up to the immense influence of Townes Van Zandt, the songwriter’s songwriter, a truly towering figure in Americana. When he released “Waitin’ Around to Die,” he changed the course of country music forever. Townes is the sacred cow of authenticity in country music; he entered codeine into the lexicon with the final verse of outlaw country’s inaugural anthem.

As a commercial genre, “outlaw country” is tied to the best-selling peaks of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and others, who took up with the burgeoning country scene that took over Austin in the 1970s and borrowed heavily from their new, hard-living friends to craft a new country sound and aesthetic in direct contrast to the polished Nashville country of the 1960s.

Although the big names in outlaw country sold millions of records—and Townes’ biggest ( and only) hit was Willie and Merle Haggard’s 1983 cover of “Pancho and Lefty”—the “outlaw country” superstars found their aesthetic and sonic roots in the zeitgeist generated by Texas songwriters of the era like Townes, Guy Clark, and Blaze Foley. There is no shame in the ecstasy of influence, of course. All great art comes from standing on the shoulders of giants.

Later this week, I will tackle some codeine-curious songs from modern Americana.

“Cod’Ine” (1964)

Codeine is a low-grade opioid painkiller, sold over the counter in many countries. Despite that, its high potential for abuse and general availability has made it a prominent fixture in American folk and country since (at least) 1964, when a West Village folk singer named Buffy Sainte-Marie released the song “Cod’ine.” The song quickly became a coffeehouse standard; it was soon covered by Donovan, Janis Joplin, and Gram Parsons.

Stay away from the cities, stay away from the towns,
stay away from the men pushin' the codeine around,
stay away from the stores where the remedy is fine,
for better your pain than be caught on cod'ine.

The song itself is a melodramatic anti-drug folk screed that borrows heavily from Dylan—like every folk song written in 1964. Sainte-Marie wrote it as she recovered from codeine addiction developed during a nasty bronchial infection. The song doesn’t really hold up, if you ask me; it has an over-moralizing slant that undermines Sainte-Marie’s beautiful singing.

And one more nitpick: the word “codeine” is pronounced “KOH-deen,” but Sainte-Marie titled her song “co’dine,” which she pronounces as “Koh-DYNE.” This allows her to rhyme the drug with “fine” and “time,” and further distances the whole endeavor from the nasty reality of drug addiction.

Perhaps this put-upon theatricality is just right for “Buffy Sainte-Marie,” who was born Beverley Jean Santamaria, and spent 40+ years claiming to be (at various times) Algonquin, full-blooded Algonquin, Mi'kmaq, and half-Mi'kmaq before her 2023 exposure as the Massachusetts-born daughter of European immigrants.

“Waitin’ Around to Die” (1967)

“Waitin’ Around to Die” is the paradigmatic Townes Van Zandt song, and perhaps the paradigmatic outlaw country song as well. It serves as both mission statement and semi-fictive autobiography. Unlike the song’s narrator, Townes grew up rich—and he was no criminal. But he lived like an outlaw and the emotional texture of the song meaningfully reflects a songwriter who filled his life with hard drugs and easy women.

Now I'm out of prison
I got me a friend at last
He don't drink or steal or cheat or lie

His name is codeine
And he's the nicest thing I've seen
And together we're gonna wait around and die
Together we're gonna wait around and die

Townes was a world-weary cynic from the very beginning, and it comes across in the way he positions codeine here, as an honorable friend, someone to “wait around and die” with. He was only 23 years old when he wrote this song. In the context of the life yet to come—Townes would die at 52, after three long decades of alcohol and drug abuse—the song takes on a dark prophetic quality.

It is better than Sainte-Marie’s song, not because it is presents codeine in a positive light—it doesn’t—but because there is an ambiguity and depth to its lyricism. We are presented the story of a miserable, damaged drifter, and this allows us to appreciate the layered complexity of his self-aware decline into a codeine-fueled fugue state.

Going from “Cod’ine” to “Waitin’ Around to Die” is emblematic of the way that acoustic songwriting mutated and (in my opinion) improved as the folkie spirit found new, darker purchase in late-60s Texas, as artists like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt melded folk with the country-blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins to help create the world of outlaw country.

Leonard Cohen & the Chelsea Hotel

New York City, middle of the night. 1968. Leonard Cohen was in an aimless state of mind; his debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, had been released the year prior to some mild praise and mediocre remuneration. But Cohen had a little money in his pocket, and he wanted to feel like he was part of the scene. So he was staying at the Chelsea Hotel, on 23rd, between 7th and 8th Avenue. The shabby-chic hotel was the place to be for the rockstars, poets, and bohemian artists who comprised the new avant-garde, lively with the sounds of booze and grass-fueled parties, its dirty hotel-room floors littered with empty bottles and joints burnt down to the filter.

A veritable who’s-who of the counter-cultural illuminati wrote songs about the Chelsea Hotel; there was Lou Reed’s “Chelsea Girls” (1967), Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” (1969), and some years later, Dylan would wheeze poetically about taking speed and “staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel.”

But the year was 1968, and Leonard Cohen was miles away from being Lou Reed or Bob Dylan. At this point he was just an odd, self-serious little Jewish guy in his 30s, known for his poetry even more than his music. And it was the middle of the night, and Leonard Cohen felt like shit. “It was a dismal evening in New York City,” he told his biographer, Sylvie Simmons. So he went for a walk, and grabbed a cheeseburger from an all-night joint, which “didn’t help at all.”

According to Cohen, he got back to the Chelsea around 3:00 AM, and made his way through the cramped lobby to get in the oft-broken elevator. He was accompanied in the elevator by none other than Janis Joplin.

Janis Joplin, Rockstar

Janis Joplin was a hard-living folk singer on the fringes of the Haight-Ashbury scene when she was recruited by the psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company to be their lead singer in 1966. A year later, at the Monterey Pop Festival, the caterpillar became a butterfly. Joplin sang a cover of the Big Mama Thornton song “Ball and Chain,” and nothing was ever the same again. Her wild, bluesy, mezzo-soprano rendition of the track stunned the festival crowd.

If you have a minute, please press play on the video; the footage is incredible. Clive Davis, the head of Columbia Records at the time, was so impressed that he immediately signed Joplin and the band to a lucrative record deal. Power player Albert Grossman—at the time, the manager of Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary—signed Joplin the same week. He only requested that she promise to never use needles; the burgeoning rockstar already had a reputation for partying. Also present was “Mama Cass” Elliott, the legendary lead singer of the Mamas and the Papas, whose stunned, joyous expression was captured on camera (see below).

Leonard & Janis in the elevator

Let’s take it back to a late spring evening in 1968, back to the Chelsea Hotel, where Joplin was staying while she recorded Cheap Thrills, which would become her first #1 album when it was released later that year. Let’s go back to the elevator, where Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen took a long look at each other.

Eventually Cohen worked up the courage to say, “Are you looking for someone?” Joplin said “Yes, I’m looking for Kris Kristofferson.” Cohen wryly joked, “Little lady, you’re in luck, I am Kris Kristofferson.”

The above lines are italicized because they describe something that did not actually happen.

Cohen loved telling this story in concert through the late ‘80s, and he told it more or less the same every time. But it is extremely unlikely that Janis Joplin was “looking” for Kris Kristofferson in 1968, given that they met for the first time in 1970. In 1968, Kristofferson was just a wannabe-songwriter working maintenance for Columbia Records.

So it’s safe to say that Leonard Cohen made this story up. It’s a harmless lie, and it dovetails with Cohen’s humorous nature—Kristofferson was a tall, handsome dude from Texas, basically the opposite of the diminutive Jew from Canada. It fits with the lyrics, as Joplin says she prefers handsome men.

We will never know exactly what was said in the elevator. What we know is that one thing led to another, and Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen spent what was left of the night in bed together. What we know is that Janis Joplin would release the hottest album in rock ‘n roll later that year, that she would struggle to cope with the chaos of life during her meteoric rise to stardom, that she would become addicted to heroin and die of an overdose in the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood on October 4th, 1970; and that a year later, Leonard Cohen would sit down with pen and paper to write “Chelsea Hotel #2.”

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Chelsea Hotel #2

Musically, “Chelsea Hotel #2”—now considered a Cohen standard—is a study in restraint, with Cohen’s affectless 70s-era baritone (his voice would deepen and complexify later in life) flatly talk-singing over a fingerpicked guitar melody. For brief moments in the song, cello strings swell in the background, never louder than the vocal track. The spare, unvarnished production forces the listener to focus on the singer’s words; the most important part of a Leonard Cohen song is always the lyrics.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
you were talking so brave and so sweet
giving me head on the unmade bed
while the limousines wait in the street

Those were the reasons, and that was New York
we were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love, for the workers in song
probably still is for those of them left.

This song’s fame—or infamy—is at least partially owed to its lewdness. To many, this is the song where Leonard Cohen says that Janis Joplin gave him head. This may have once amused Cohen, but by the ‘90s it had become a source of shame. In 1994, he told a radio interviewer:

I used the line 'giving me head on an unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street,' and I've always disliked the locker-room approach to these matters...

I named Janis Joplin in that song. I’ve been feeling very bad about that ever since. It's an indiscretion…I'm very sorry, and if there is some way of apologizing to the ghost, I want to apologize now, for that indiscretion.

Cohen continued to play the song, but stopped telling the story about their encounter. Perhaps he felt bad about the aforementioned lie, as harmless as it was. Regardless, I don’t think Leonard Cohen should have felt any shame for writing this song. Joplin was an unabashed rockstar, and the song—in a roundabout, representative sense—tells the truth.

To me, the song’s epistemic integrity stems from what he doesn’t say, the lyrics he could have but did not write. Just think about the facts on the ground here. It’s the middle of the night when a young poet and songwriter meets a wild rockstar in the elevator of the Chelsea Hotel, before he beds her (or she beds him) for the night. Isn’t that glamorous? Isn’t that sexy? To have Leonard Cohen tell it…only sorta.

Go back to the two-stanza verse that kicks the song off. At every turn, Cohen makes the prosaic choice, resists his deeply poetic instincts. Their sexual encounter— “gave me head.” Their physical setting— “the unmade bed.” Their musical milieu is not given artistic credit, and described as “running for the money and the flesh.” The artists themselves are labeled “the workers in song,” a bit of mundanely Communist phraseology that brings a smile to my face a half-century on.

Now but you got away, didn't you babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say

I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jivin' around

The latter half of the chorus is the most forgettable part of the song, as Cohen vamps for melodic purposes, basically saying their encounter was too brief to feature much in the way of romantic melodrama. However, the first two lines of the chorus are among the most poignant that Leonard Cohen ever wrote, as he takes a break from the song’s straightforward prose style to offer an impressionist take on Janis Joplin’s 1970 heroin overdose in the Hollywood Landmark hotel.

His framing of the overdose is both generous and reverent, and there’s a barely perceptible lilt in his voice as he sings: You got away, didn’t you babe? You just turned your back on the crowd. Here he paints Joplin’s death as a conscious retreat from the overwhelming nature of public life; like she was just a performer who exited stage left. Someone who moved on to a better existence in the great beyond.

And I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again, you preferred handsome men
But for me you would make an exception

And clenching your fist for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself, you said, "Well, never mind
We are ugly but we have the music"

This is a very funny verse, made funnier by Cohen’s somber, tongue-in-cheek vocals. He drily notes that Joplin “preferred handsome men,” and admits to being a rare exception to her rule. But then he makes a dig right back at Joplin, as he describes the shortlived pairing as “oppressed by the figures of beauty,” i.e. unattractive relative to the platonic ideals of American sex iconism.

Given Cohen’s history of fictionalizing the details of his encounter with Joplin, I have to question the accuracy of the dialogue he recounts in these lyrics. I think it’s fair to say that this song at its best represents what Leonard Cohen felt about his night with Janis Joplin. It’s important to remember that it was written post-hoc, more than 3 years after they met, and occasioned by her tragic death by overdose. The song is built on memories, and memories are always blurred by the passage of time.

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best
I can't keep track of each fallen robin

The final verse of “Chelsea Hotel #2” has been read as disrespectful or cruel by many listeners and critics. On the contrary, I think that this verse puts the finishing touches on a moving and honest memorial song.

As previously discussed, Cohen doesn’t glamorize the Chelsea hotel; he also doesn’t glamorize his rockstar milieu, his sexual experience with Joplin, his impact on her, or her impact on him. He only allows himself one transportive, poetic moment, in the lines that describe her death by overdose: You got away, didn’t you babe? You just turned your back on the crowd.

Others have interpreted Cohen’s stated inability to keep track of each fallen robin as a commentary on his high quantity of sexual partners. But in the historical context of “Chelsea Hotel #2,” a more parsimonious explanation asserts itself. The “fallen robins” are not women he slept with; they are artists who died.

Hendrix and Joplin died a month apart in 1970; less than a year later, Jim Morrison had a fatal heart attack in his bath tub. The next three years would also see the deaths of Duane Allman, Gram Parsons, Jim Croce, and Mama Cass Elliott. Cohen himself likely knew others, less famous, who died as well. By 1971-1974—the years during which Cohen penned “Chelsea Hotel #2”—the cultural tidal wave of the 60s was finally crashing. People were starting to get wet (h/t Elliott Smith); people were starting to die.

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
That's all, I don't think even of you that often

Cohen only knew Janis Joplin for one night. It was not particularly notable; it did not change either of their lives. But Janis Joplin was notable, Janis Joplin was special. Cohen asserts it himself, earlier in the song: You were famous, your heart was a legend. And he remembers her well, in the Chelsea Hotel.

As the song comes to a close, he sings softly to the late Janis Joplin: That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often. This, too, is ultimately a mark of humility and respect. It would be a lie to say that he obsesses over her memory. It would be a lie to say that he loved her. In fact, he barely knew her on a personal level.

But she was still Janis Joplin, and when she died, Cohen felt the creative spirit move through him. She was Janis Joplin, and she was and is worthy of being remembered. She was worthy of being memorialized, worthy of the only memorial that Leonard Cohen could write—worthy, ultimately, of the type of memorial that only Leonard Cohen could write.

It took him three years to finish “Chelsea Hotel #2,” an unassuming and gorgeous song about the short, Jewish, 33 year-old songwriter-poet’s overnight fling with a shooting star, a veritable rocketship, a transcendently voiced talent whose unquenched thirst for the hard stuff took her from the world far too soon. Don’t listen to what anyone else tells you. “Chelsea Hotel #2” is l’kavod (in honor of, in glory of) Janis Joplin.

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I listened to “November Air” for the first time on a long drive from Northern California back home to Los Angeles. It was late at night, and I was a newly-converted fan of Zach Bryan at this point. There was a heavy fog in the air that night, and it colored my understanding of the song. I realized first that this was a song about Zach Bryan’s late mother, and later—on repeat listens—that the song’s central conceit, “November Air,” serves as metaphorical barrier or liminal space between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead.

At this stage of his career, almost all of Zach Bryan’s songs were stripped-back, acoustic country with simple melodies, and “November Air,” which features fingerpicking during the verses and strumming during the chorus, is no exception. A cello and fiddle come in and out of the song to provide a swelling texture throughout, but the main emotional vehicle is Bryan’s sweet, raw singing.

You remember sittin' there
One rainy night in a well-used chair
Tellin' me how well you used to dance

The western wind will come again
And make you feel like you did
When all those cowboys didn't stand a chance

The song’s introductory verse sets the song’s narrative framework: Zach Bryan, speaking to his late mother, remembering the things she used to tell him. There is a nice touch of religious mysticism here as well. The western wind will come again, he sings, which suggests a gust of heaven, an afterlife that will make his mother feel young again. In the next verse he takes it a step further, and speaks the words that he wants to say so badly.

Two kids 'bout twenty-three
And the sunsets you'll never see
You were yellin' "supper" from the yard

And they grew old and sailed away
Called you on phones from far away
Wrote you novels on postcards

The lines are heartbreakingly sweet; Bryan gets right to the point. He mentions the sunsets his mom will never see; he remembers writing her cards from somewhere far away in the Navy (Bryan was stationed, among other places, in Djibouti and Bahrain).

And all you ever wanted
Was to see your children fly
Maybe one day they're a star

But there ain't no leavin'
This small town this evenin'
You can't even drive your own car

Through November air (x3)

Here the singer aches for his mother’s dreams, which are made all the more brutally poignant by their having come true. Because Zach Bryan did fly, he became a star. But his mom can’t see it for herself. When he says that “there ain’t no leavin’,” I think he is reestablishing the fantastical nature of this song. The conversational lyrics are taking place in his head; the woman he sings to isn’t really there. Or where she is—the “small town” where she died—is in the non-physical dimension.

In the song, “November Air” serves as a barrier between life and death, between the world where Annette Bryan lives and the world—the real, physical world—where Zach Bryan lives. If his mother was able to drive through November Air, she might be able to see her children again. But she can’t; she has passed on.

Dear Ma, how's it goin'?
Was the weather fair last week?
Dear Ma, they were wonderful
All the sights you'll never see

And dear Ma, if I could hold you, I'd grab you by the arms
Tell you what it means
You could take a worthless poor boy from the flats
And make him mean something

The mention of “all the sights” she will never see has always been especially painful for me. The Bryans were a military family, decidedly on the lower end of middle-class in small-town Oklahoma. Zach Bryan has become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams now; he is well on his way to being a billionaire. But he can’t take his mom to a steakhouse in New York City. He’ll never fly her to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower. These are things she will never see.

The chorus of this song is basically its own verse; in many of Zach Bryan’s best works, you get the sense that he is running out of space for his lyrics, like he’s always got more to say. He takes on a vocal urgency in the second stanza here, his voice nearly cracking as he sings if I could hold you, I’d grab you by the arms, tell you what it means. You get the sense that he desperately needs to thank her, to tell her more than he could while she was alive.

Tell us what you wanted to
In all we did, we needed you
Your dreams were too small to care

But I'm always reminded
If you look hard, you'll find it
Memory gives warmth to right here

Through November air (x3)

In the song’s final verse, Bryan makes one more impossible request. He asks his mother to tell him what she “wanted to,” hinting perhaps at a dark reality: his mother, who died due to complications related to alcoholism, may not have had the chance to say everything she wanted.

He brings himself back to reality in the next stanza, reminding himself that even if they can’t physically speak, his mother’s presence is available—bordering on tangible—conjurable through memory, which gives warmth to the present. And that memory is so powerful, so transcendent, as to pierce the aforementioned barrier of the titular “November Air.” In these words the song is elevated to near-seance; Bryan has begged for a conversation with his mother, said what he needed to say, and—finally—realized that he is capable of finding warmth and comfort in the simple, essential memory of sitting around and talking to his mom.

Early Classic—“Sam Stone”

In 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert walked into a folk music club—they used to have clubs where people played folk music—and happened to hear some songs by a mailman named John Prine. Ebert knew that he was catching a glimpse of something special.

He sings rather quietly, and his guitar work is good, but he doesn’t show off. He starts slow. But after a song or two, even the drunks in the room begin to listen to his lyrics. And then he has you.

The late critic especially liked a protest song called “The Great Society Conflict Veteran’s Blues.” By the time it came out on John Prine in 1971, the song had been renamed to “Sam Stone.”

It’s easy to see why people called Prine “New Dylan” at the time. The talking-blues singing; the nasally tone. While the influence is undeniable—and Dylan himself has spoken fondly of Prine’s “pure Proustian existentialism—” they strike me as radically different songwriters.

Even Dylan’s early narrative tracks, like “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” leaned heavily impressionist, with meandering melodies, semi-chanted choruses and riff-heavy lyrics that stemmed from his improvisational modus operandi.

Prine’s “Sam Stone,” by contrast, is very tightly written in a verse-chorus-verse structure that repeats three times over a recursive fingerpicked melody. In the song, Prine tells a tidy multi-year story about the end of a Vietnam veteran’s life. Sam Stone comes home from the war with PTSD and an opiate addiction, runs out of money, overdoses and dies.

Sam Stone came home to his wife and family
After serving in the conflict overseas
And the time that he'd served had shattered all his nerves
And left a little shrapnel in his knees

But the morphine eased the pain
And the grass grew 'round his brain
And gave him all the confidence he lacked
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back

It’s worth noting that John Prine himself, who was drafted into the US Army in 1966 at the height of the Vietnam War, never saw combat. Instead he was stationed in West Germany as a mechanic and returned home after two uneventful years. Prine worked as a mailman after his service; he spent countless hours strolling around suburban Illinois, turning over character and story in his head.

Perhaps this lack of personal experience is why “Sam Stone,” for all its brilliance, comes across as an amalgamation of Vietnam War veteran stereotypes. Its main character is given no unique characteristics; Prine writes him vaguely so that he can serve as an archetypal stand-in for the thousands of fucked-up men who came home from their fucked-up country’s fucked-up war.

Prine delighted in the use of lyrical reversals that could subvert in-song and even in-stanza expectations. “The morphine eased the pain,” right, but we don’t get to sit with that, to live in it. In just the next line we are told that “the grass grew ‘round his brain,” layering some ominous darkness over the comfort of the high. The drugs give Sam Stone “all the confidence he lacked,” but he also came home with a “purple heart and a monkey on his back.” In the anti-war context of Sam Stone, of course, the purple heart—a medal given to soldiers wounded in combat—is no less of an albatross than the “monkey on his back” (drug addiction). Both of them are a terrible weight to bear; these are the things men like Sam Stone carried.

There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose
Little pitchers have big ears, don't stop to count the years
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios, hm-hm-hm-hm

It has been nearly six decades since John Prine wrote this song, and I’m not sure anyone since has penned a better chorus. Say it out loud to yourself, taste the musicality of the syllables: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes.” It’s a metaphor, but its meaning is direct and unmissable. Then comes the infamous line about Jesus, which has always spoken to me.

To say that Jesus Christ died for nothing—to be brought to this idea by the imagined experience of the PTSD-riddled, opiate-addicted Sam Stone—is to express that the problem of evil, the weight of this veteran’s suffering, is so immense that it undermines the crucifixion of the Lord. This cheeky heresy is classic Prine, who loved to subvert cultural touchstones.

He subverts himself—his own liberal pieties—with the postscript: “I suppose,” rescuing the song from its sincerity and its politics, allowing a cloud of ambiguity to linger over the meaning of his main character’s eventual death. Just like Jesus Christ, Prine seems to imply, Sam Stone died for nothing. Maybe.

Late Classic— “Summer’s End”

The Tree of Forgiveness, John Prine’s final album, came out in 2018, about two years before he died of complications related to COVID-19. It features the outstanding “Summer’s End,” which—like most Prine songs—is an unadorned folk melody where the singing is closely matched to the chord progression. The song is a wonderful showcase for Prine’s late-era vocals; its huskiness is matched to a trembly quality that imbues “Summer’s End” with wise gravitas and knowing sadness.

It’s that sadness that I clung to the first time I heard the song. I couldn’t tell what the lyrics were about, but I could tell they were about something. I listened to it over and over, sang along to it and tried to imagine writing something this special. Recently I learned that the song was written after Max Barry, the son of Prine’s close friend, died of a drug overdose at 22 years old.

Summer's end is around the bend just flying
The swimming suits are on the line just drying
I'll meet you there per our conversation
I hope I didn't ruin your whole vacation

Well you never know how far from home you're feeling
Until you watch the shadows cross the ceiling
Well I don't know but I can see it snowing
In your car the windows are wide open

Come on home
Come on home
No you don't have to be alone
Just come on home

The song is written from the perspective of an addict’s parent. Its title and thematic focus is the end of innocence. The swimming suits here—symbolizing childhood, frivolity, summer—are not being worn. They are on the line just drying, because this song takes place after.

The second pre-chorus stanza is less opaque than it seems after a number of careful readings. Here the narrator sings to his son, who has left home—or perhaps been kicked out. He talks about, warns about, homesickness, which comes at night when “the shadows cross the ceiling.” We know there is a great distance between them, as he says “Well I don’t know but I can see it snowing,” admitting that this is just a made-up image in his head. Crucially he references snow—because summer, after all, is over. When he imagines that the windows in his son’s car are “wide open,” he expresses an anxiety that this person—who will always be his baby, no matter his age—is fundamentally incapable of taking care of himself.

The chorus is a plea, an interpersonal request: come on home. The chorus instructs the listeners to imagine the narrator of this song as he pens a long letter, or writes an email, or extemporizes lovingly on a voicemail.

The moon and stars hang out in bars just talking
I still love that picture of us walking
Just like that ol' house we thought was haunted
Summer's end came faster than we wanted

Come on home
Come on home
No you don't have to be alone (x2)

Here the narrator imagines celestial bodies, hanging out in bars; it strikes me as a pure and vivid flight of imagination, like something from a bedtime story. We are quickly brought low again by the bittersweet sadness of the next line: “I still love that picture of us walking,” underlined by the slow and generous way that Prine stretches out the word walking.

There is something special about verite photos of loved ones, especially once they are gone. They capture a moment in time, preserving the intimate chaos of real life. Because in that one picture, at least, the narrator and his subject are able to be together, walking. This is how grief brings you low, how it sharpens your intense need for those you lost. You do not dare to wish for happiness, for hugs, for emotional conversations. You settle for—you grow to love—that picture of us walking.

The closing lines here suggest that the song’s subject is already dead. After all, “Summer’s end came faster than we wanted,” he sings. It is a sobering, gorgeously spare way to tell us that a young man has died. These lines reframe the chorus, and with it the whole song. The tender refrain to come on home is spoken to the memory of a son. It is closer to a mournful prayer than a genuine request.

To Sum It All Up

“Sam Stone,” which played a significant role in Prine’s ascension to folk-laureate status, is a fable about a fictional, PTSD-riddled veteran’s multi-year arc towards overdose. It plays as melodrama, all of its elements—drug addiction, poverty, death—heightened with provocatively descriptive lanaguage. The heroin rolls through Sam Stone’s blood “like a thousand railroad trains,” we are told, and the kids run around “wearing other people’s clothes.” Prine heightens and tragicizes Sam Stone’s fate to criticize his country and its hopeless overseas interventionism.

“Summer’s End” is something else entirely. Here Prine chooses to live inside of the pain that parents feel when their child succumbs to drug addiction. He sidesteps the nasty personal details, painting his story—outlining his story, really—with watery, drifting paints, showing us not what happened but what it feels like to have that happen to you.

It has been five years since John Prine died, and no one has stepped up to fill his shoes, although Jason Isbell and Gillian Welch and Sturgill Simpson and countless others carry the torch in related subgenres. There are so many outstanding John Prine songs that to write about only two, to pick any two, feels impossible. For now, I’ll just reaffirm my unwavering love for his art and suggest that “Sam Stone” and “Summer’s End” serve as an effectively themed double feature from one of the best folk songwriters who ever lived.

P.S.

Both of these songs have some great covers. My favorite “Sam Stone” covers are by R&B singer Swamp Dogg and lo-fi impresario Teen Suicide; you might also enjoy Phoebe Bridger’s heart-rending take on “Summer’s End.”

Even if Sufjan Stevens never released five Christmas albums, or spoke to Pitchfork about his fundamental “love of God,” his listeners would know he was a passionate Christian. His faith is woven into the fabric of his discography; many of his best songs feature lyrical references to Jesus and his works. The most profound and painful expression of Sufjan’s religious beliefs comes in “Casimir Pulaski Day,” a towering musical accomplishment and one of the saddest songs ever written.

The song is easy on the ears, as Sufjan utilizes his signature hushed and double-tracked vocals to croon delicately over a fingerpicked acoustic folk melody. The effect, as always with Sufjan Stevens, is one of crushing intimacy. It is only at the very end, when the narrative turns to a pitch-black darkness, that bright trumpets join in with Sufjan’s melodies.

Goldenrod and the 4-H stone
The things I brought you
When I found out you had cancer of the bone

Your father cried on the telephone
And he drove his car into the Navy yard
Just to prove that he was sorry

The opening lines of “Casimir Pulaski Day,” a story-song about a young woman’s death from bone cancer, set a devastating scene. Adorable, pointless gifts that the young male narrator brings to his girlfriend’s sickbed; her father’s aimless misery.

This song was my entry point to Sufjan Stevens as a teenager, drawn in by the song’s maudlin storytelling. Ten years and several hundred listens (at least) later, I have started to see layers of theological and personal meaning that extend beyond its central sob story. The tragic death of the song’s subject is framed as a great trial that its narrator must overcome to build his scarred and resilient faith in God.

In the morning, through the window shade
When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade
I could see what you were reading
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications you could do without
When I kissed you on the mouth

The effectiveness of this stanza hinges on its structural ambiguity. The phrase “the complications you could do without” is strung between two poles: the glory of the Lord’s creation in the preceding line, and the messy, beautiful nature of a kiss in the next line. Do our complications stem from the actions of God, or the fragile reality of human love? Sufjan leaves the question unanswered, forcing the listener to stew in the in-between.

Tuesday night at the Bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

This scene—in which the narrator participates in ineffectual group prayer—will scan to many as a dismissal or rejection of God’s role in the world. But there’s a clue in Sufjan’s flat and affectless vocal delivery of “nothing ever happens.” The sense you get here is that the narrator never expected anything to happen from prayer, because that’s not how prayer works.

In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote: “Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face.”

On the floor at the great divide
With my shirt tucked in and my shoes untied
I am crying in the bathroom

For me, the image of a young man with his shirt tucked and shoes untied has always evoked the formal awkwardness of a school dance or wedding reception. But go back to the first line, go back to the narrator being on the floor at the great divide. What does this mean? What is the “great divide?”

I know of two songs that make this reference. One is “The Last Resort” by The Eagles, a melancholy slow jam about (more or less) American colonization/Manifest Destiny. When Don Henley croons that “they came from everywhere, to the great divide,” he is using its literal geographic meaning: the Continental Divide of the Americas that extends from the Bering Strait to the Strait of Magellan.

The other song, which hews closer to Sufjan’s intended meaning, is “Ft. Worth Blues,” a stunning tribute song that Steve Earle wrote for his mentor-icon-abuser Townes Van Zandt after his death. Earle sings:

Somewhere up beyond the great divide
Where the sky is wide
And the clouds are few
A man can see his way clear to the light
Just hold on tight

Here the “great divide” is a metaphysical barrier that separates life from death, or the gap between the physical and spiritual realms. This is the version of the idea that Sufjan refers to. In the face of bone cancer, his narrator has been thrust into a terrible new knowledge. The River Styx is suddenly coursing through small-town Illinois, and he has been forced to see that the people he loves can and will die.

In the morning, when you finally go
And the nurse runs in with her head hung low
And the cardinal hits the window
In the morning, in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

On the first of March—the Chicago holiday of Casimir Pulaski Day—the young woman finally dies. Where a lesser writer might focus on the physical, dying body, Sufjan supplies portent through the indelible images that surround death. The nurse running in with her head hung low; the symbolic cardinal hitting the window. It is poetic, oblique, but somehow also direct in its meanings.

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see his face
In the morning, in the window
All the glory when he took our place

As “Casimir Pulaski Day” concludes, Sufjan delivers his clearest statement of Christian belief. He reaffirms God’s glory in creation, and notes the places where he sees God’s face: in the morning, in the window. This revelatory tone is intensified by his reference to Jesus’ sacrificial atonement on the cross. These are affirmations of faith, statements of belief, and they serve as the establishing shots for the song’s final lines, where a raw expression of wounded belief comes into full view.

But he took my shoulders and he shook my face
And he takes, and he takes, and he takes

Think of what it means to say that God took my shoulders, to say he shook my face. These are acts of divine discipline. God is right here, in the morning, in the window, and he takes and he takes and he takes. Sufjan Stevens’ God is not a distant, inactive deity. His sovereignty is active and eternal, even in its inscrutability. We do not know why we lose people. We do not know why young people die of cancer. But implied here—I think—is an insistence that there are reasons, hidden in the mystery of God’s plan for the universe.

And this brings me to a bigger point, which is that we should grapple with the religious faith of our greatest artists as more than a weird personal quirk. Most cultural criticism has a distinctly secular nature, which makes sense; nonreligious people don’t like to think about religion. But in the case of Sufjan Stevens, at least, a full appraisal of his work must take his Christianity into account. It’s at the very core of his artistic approach, and “Casimir Pulaski Day” is just one example of that thematic centrality.

understanding sufjan

The word “enigmatic” is defined as difficult to understand, which means that when I call the folk singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens enigmatic, I am basically saying that I don’t know how to describe him. I could try some other adjectives, like: genius, gay, prolific, Christian. These are all accurate, but they don’t say enough, because Sufjan Stevens really is enigmatic.

This is a man who once announced his intention to make one album for each state in the Union, recorded Michigan (2003) and Illinois (2005)—both widely regarded as classics—and promptly gave up on the idea with 48 albums to go. This is an artist whose 2020 album, Ascension, was heavily electronic—primarily due to a bad landlord situation in Brooklyn that led to Sufjan’s favorite guitar being in storage. This is a guy who recently said that 2015’s Carrie and Lowell—the rare perfect album, a stunning accomplishment that received universal praise—was a “failure,” and referred to his songwriting on the project as a “miscarriage of bad intentions.”

Sufjan has generally refused to make political statements; he rarely gives interviews. He pops up occasionally as a credited producer on some genuinely bad music, made by artists no one has ever heard of. Though his lyrics have carried oblique allusions to his sexuality for decades, it was only very recently that he explicitly “came out” in a poignant 2023 Instagram post mourning the death of his late partner.

the song i’m writing about today

This enigmatic quality permeates Sufjan’s discography, particularly in some of his earlier, research-heavy songwriting, exemplified by “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” a bizarre and profound song about the infamous serial-killing clown. It’s a gorgeous bit of sparse folk music, with whispery vocals over a simple, fingerpicked chord progression. Sonically, it lands somewhere in between Elliott Smith and Nick Drake.

The premise of this song, it must be said, verges on poor taste. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. was a serial killer in an outlying Chicago suburb who sexually abused and then murdered at least 33 young men and boys; it is possible there are more victims, as-yet unidentified. He buried most of the bodies in the crawl space under his house, and threw some into the river. Yet Sufjan starts the song with an unsettlingly empathetic glimpse into the childhood of the serial killer.

His father was a drinker
And his mother cried in bed
Folding John Wayne's t-shirts
When the swingset hit his head
The neighbors, they adored him
For his humor and his conversation

Here, Sufjan evinces a sort of entry-level criminal psychological explanation for how someone like John Wayne Gacy, Jr. becomes a serial killer. An alcoholic dad, a fucked-up mom, and a childhood brain injury. He also emphasizes the killer’s well-documented charisma. There is a focus on economy in these lyrics; in just a few lines, Sufjan has conjured an unnerving familiarity with the song’s subject.

Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things, rotting fast, in their sleep
Oh, the dead
Twenty-seven people
Even more, they were boys
With their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God
Are you one of them?

This is a clever verse, structured to make the listener confront the bracing reality of Gacy’s dead victims. It starts in a place of naivete, as the listener is told to look in the crawl space, find the “living things, rotting fast, in their sleep…” This is how a child might understand the bodies. Next they are referred to as “the dead,” and then they become “twenty-seven people,” and then it’s like Sufjan himself begins to recognize their specific humanity with the breathless lines: “Even more, they were boys, with their cars, summer jobs,” and this painful realization impacts his vocal approach, forcing him into a stunning falsetto as he moans “Oh my God…”

The effect is that of Sufjan himself, alongside the listener, beginning to understand the immense weight of John Wayne Gacy Jr.’s crimes. The verse ends in ambiguity with the hushed, curious: “Are you one of them?” He is singing to himself and to his audience, asking them if they—like him—empathize with the victims; asking if they—like him—see something of themselves in the dead boys.

He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red
And on his best behavior
In a dark room on the bed
He kissed them all

He'd kill ten thousand people
With a sleight of his hand
Running far, running fast to the dead
He took off all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips
Quiet hands, quiet kiss on the mouth

It bears reiterating that this song shouldn’t actually work. It is incredibly disturbing; in this verse, Stevens describes the prelude to the murders. These are abusive acts, but he makes them sound delicate, softly ritualistic. The stripping of the murder victims becomes: “He took off all their clothes for them.” The use of chloroform to knock out the murder victims becomes “He put a cloth on their lips.”

But if you listen to the song with an open mind, I suspect that 'you’ll find it does more than work. It is so beautiful to listen to, so tenderly written and performed, that the content slips right past you. And the song’s closing lyrics reveal that it’s not about John Wayne Gacy, Jr. at all.

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

Just like a movie’s closing shot or a book’s final pages, the last words of a great song can reveal its true meaning. In the case of Sufjan Steven’s “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” the subject is Sufjan Stevens. The metaphorical imagery is vivid and direct. Dead bodies beneath the floorboards evoke secrets kept for too long, sins buried deep. And in the case of Sufjan Stevens, a man who spent decades in the spotlight without explicitly revealing his sexuality, the resonance is clear.

I want to be clear that this song is not just about “being gay,” or being closeted. That would be too simple for a writer of Stevens’ depth. But it’s not not about those things, either. This is a celebrity who spent over 20 years in the shadows, restraining from public indication of his sexual or romantic life. I think this song might be about the guilt that often comes with casual sex, the internalized sorrow one feels post-seduction, post-physicality, when your partner has been discarded. It might be about boyfriends past, even serious boyfriends, men whose importance to Sufjan was never publicized. I say might because this song, much like Sufjan, really is enigmatic, really does resist unsubtle analysis.

In “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” Sufjan identifies with a serial killer not to humanize the serial killer, but to pathologize himself. It is a searching and wistful interrogation of his psychological makeup, a bracing awareness of interior darkness. It makes me imagine its writer standing in front of a mirror, picking at his pores. It’s also one of the prettiest songs ever made, and that dualism—the way his art holds space for deeply oppositional qualities—is key to the herculean task of describing Sufjan Stevens.

intro

Last week, I sat in a row of leather seats at Gate 62B in Terminal 6 at LAX, waiting to board a flight to Dallas with my wife. The airport was quiet, even for a Wednesday night after 11pm. But even in the relative stillness, there is always a restless, discomfiting energy at the airport. I suppose it’s the nature of a transitive or liminal space, somewhere you go to get somewhere else. Speaking of transitive—Dallas wasn’t our final destination. My wife and I were going to meet her parents, with whom we would then drive to Arkansas for a brief vacation.

My RLS was already kicking in, quadricep and calf muscles pre-cramping in anticipation of the Basic Economy seating arrangements on Spirit Airlines flight 2416. I bent down and squeezed at my left calf, hoping to quiet the ache. It didn’t help, so I gave up and slouched deeper in my chair.

After a few tired scrolls on Twitter, something caught my attention. A culture writer named Nate Rogers, sharing his new piece for Vulture about Bill Fox, a press-shy songwriter-genius. I clicked over to Spotify—was this guy worth my time? I learned quickly that he was. This is a long piece, so I’d like you to start with a taste of the music. It is so good.

My intrigue went up a level when I read the accompanying article, and learned that Bill Fox was from Cleveland, of all places.

some background on cleveland

I never expect mysterious artists to be from Cleveland, partially because I am from Cleveland (the surrounding suburbs, specifically). There is, it always seemed to me, an inherently generic quality to the city that is difficult to explain to outsiders. It is “Midwestern,” which is to say bland. There is no signature cuisine or musical genre. Its primary cultural landmark is the Rock ‘N Roll Hall of Fame, which largely exists to celebrate the musical achievements of people from other cities. This broad sense of meh is exacerbated by the city’s post-hoc, formerly great status. Even amid a recent economic resurgence, many of downtown Cleveland’s buildings remain abandoned, or half-used. Most residents define themselves by their sports team allegiances. There's Browns guys, Cavs guys, and a smattering of Guardians (nèe Indians) guys.

In the defense of Cleveland, it wasn’t always like this; wasn’t always hollowed out. At the start of the 20th century, the city’s presence along the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie made it a heavy-manufacturing economic powerhouse, a blue collar stronghold that neared a million in population at its peak in the 1950s. But the increasingly globalized economy and deindustrialization of the American Midwest hit Cleveland hard. By the time the ‘70s came around, Cleveland was in heavy decline. Jobs disappeared, families fled, and businesses of all kinds shuttered. During the nation-wide recession in the early ‘80s, Cleveland’s unemployment rate was 15% higher than the national average.

the musical context

For two decades—the ‘70s and the ‘80s—Cleveland was, however, a place where interesting rock music happened. A proto-punk scene emerged, marked especially by the formation of the Rocket From The Tombs, the 1974-1975 group who would splinter into the avant-garage rock band Pere Ubu and the infamous punk band the Dead Boys. The latter experienced more fame, signing a record deal with Sire Records (more on them later) and terrorizing venues all over New York City. But Pere Ubu left a more influential mark on rock history, inspiring well-known bands like Joy Division, Sonic Youth, the Pixies to craft the corrosive energy of punk rock into a more complex, textured melodic approach.

The biggest band to come out of Cleveland rock music was Nine Inch Nails, started by Trent Reznor after moving to the city in the 1988 to work at Pi Keyboards. But I’m not here to talk about Trent Reznor. Instead I’d like to shift your focus to The Mice, the band founded in 1984 by brothers Tommy and Bill Fox.

the musical origins of bill fox

The Mice were a power pop band with Tommy on the drums, Bill playing guitar, Ken Hall on bass. Bill wrote and sang all of the songs, which stand out for their catchy hooks. Even though the Mice played brief, simple songs with energetic riffs and a hard driving beat, they were decidedly not a punk group. Their forebears were Big Star, the Beatles, and the Kinks.

Their best-known song, “Not Proud of the USA,” is very good—and it’s also a strong entry point to the mythology of Bill Fox. Bill’s dad was a proud right-wing veteran who lost a foot to a landmine in the Korean war. He attended an early Mice show where they played this song. Tommy remembers Bill staring his dad right in the eyes as he played lead guitar and sang the dark, political invective.

Dad, you say you're proud of the USA
You’re so proud of the USA
When it moves you in many ways
Dad, the blood of the Indian tribes
Was it spilled so we could have such lives?
Where we wave flags above their graves

This song is a signpost for the type of music Bill Fox would eventually make. Power pop is not, generally, protest music. The genre historically leans into schoolboy romanticism, like the quintessential power pop group Big Star’s “Thirteen:”

Won't you let me walk you home from school?
Won't you let me meet you at the pool?
Maybe Friday I can get tickets for the dance
And I'll take you, ooh-hoo

The Mice’s sped-up, mod-inflected power pop started to make waves outside of Cleveland, and as 1986 turned into 1987 they toured played other states in the Midwest and received an offer to embark on a tour that would take them across the country and then Europe. As for what happened next, the details aren’t entirely clear.

By some accounts, Bill Fox just never showed up to the airport the morning of their tour’s first leg. Or he did show up, but told his bandmates that he needed to grab a pack of cigarettes, and never came back. Everyone agrees on one thing: it was Bill who canceled the tour, Bill who killed the Mice. Tommy, his brother and closest friend, was left to deal with the fallout from his mysterious absence. The brothers didn't speak for two years.

the songwriter era begins

No one really knows, exactly, what Bill Fox has been precisely up to over the last 35 years. There are bits and pieces, scattered through the scant media coverage of his career. The impeccable longform reporting that Joe Hagan did for The Believer, published in 2007, is available here. But Fox wouldn’t meet with Hagan, or even give him a phone call, so the story has a “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” vibe—the narrative is structured by the absence of its purported subject.

I don’t want to get too deep into the bad stuff, the darkness. You can read the Hagan story linked above if you want to to learn about that. Suffice it to say that times were hard on Bill, who suffered from some occasional and intense bouts with mental illness at the turn of the decade.

More importantly, Bill Fox kept writing songs after leaving the Mice in 1987. Without a backing band—and crucially, without the sped-up rhythms of his maestro drummer brother Tommy—he transitioned to a gentle folkier sound. After his dad died, Bill used some of the money left behind for a studio session with local music world operator Tim Rossiter. There he recorded the stunning “Man of War” in 1991, which wouldn’t be released until 2025.

Stone of the nation, pride of a mother
Brother to us all
Rises at orders, marches past borders
To kill with a call
And if shell by surprise, should tear out his eyes
Then the truth gets even brighter than the day
Then all the Schwartzkopf'd and Sherman'd
More bound and determined, to blow the poor darkness away

“Man of War” is deeply indebted to Bob Dylan; in fact, you could have convinced me that this was a Dylan cover, or an early ‘60s deep cut from his war-protest era. The harmonica and the subject matter and the verbosity is all Dylanesque. But the more I listen to the song, and the rest of Fox’s discography, the more I note the distinctly Bill Foxian elements to the song.

For one, Fox was and is a master of internal rhyme and alliteration. Despite being a folk songwriter, he has a talent for writing very tight verses, with exactingly chosen syllabic structures. “…if shell by surpise, should tear out his eyes” stands out to me especially.

Further, there’s a deeply personal element to the writing. Where a classic early Dylan track like “Masters of War,” is abstracted, universalized in a near-mystical mode of songwriting—peak Dylan was always channeling something—Bill Fox’s songs are, ultimately, about Bill Fox. “Man of War” is about a deeply troubled man who wishes that he were someone else. Even if that someone else were evil, he thinks, it might be worth it. See the chorus:

And I've wandered and strayed 'neath sunshine and shade
Feet pounding from mountain to shore
Long as I've been free
I've wished I could be
As surе as a man of war

At some point in the early ‘90s, Bill Fox discovered the magic of home recording via four-track cassette tapes. From 1994-1997 he is said to have recorded well over 100 songs, and in 1997 the aforementioned Rossiter helped him release Shelter From The Smoke.

The album is a genuine masterpiece, and in retrospect it was wildly out of place in the coolness-obsessed indie rock world of the mid-late 90s. This is music without pretense; these are plain-spoken pleas for worldly justice and inner peace. “Over And Away She Goes” straight-up sounds like a Beatles song, with its closest era-specific correlate to the Beatles-y folk rock that Elliott Smith was making on the West Coast.

The most beloved song on the album is “Sara Page.” This is not a Bill Fox favorite of mine, and its cult notoriety is owed in part to its delightfully lo-fi recording. As the song begins you can hear a TV playing in the background; it provides ambience and texture, making the listeners feel as if we were sitting on Bill Fox’s couch while the song was performed.

I prefer “Appalachian Death Sigh,” a wistful country song about love lost accented by complex, swift melodic changes and some finger-picking thrown in for good measure.

When comes the day that you will weep and you will cry to find the one who will set you free

Just think back to Ohio and the chains of love you surely put on me

And when summertime is over and the air is chilled and snow begins to fall

How will I ever be so clever as to claim I never searched for you at all

I don't think I am being hyperbolic when I say this rivals anything Tom Waits or John Prine ever wrote. How the fuck does it have only 3.8k views on YouTube?

Back in 1997, Rossiter worked the phones to build some excitement for Shelter From The Smoke, and even convinced Fox to do some shows across the country after influential ‘90s outlet College Music Journal covered the album, crowning Fox as an “important” artist. Less than a year later, Transit Byzantium—another outstanding project, featuring the aforementioned career highlight “My Baby Crying”—was released, and buzz continued to build.

In 1998, Tommy Fox’s new band, the Revelers, got signed to a small indie label out of NYC called spinART. The Revelers’ bassist gave spinART a copy of Shelter From The Smoke, and its CEO Joel Morowitz fell head-over-heels, signing Bill and prioritizing him over the Revelers. (I'd like to offer a quick, empathetic nod to Tommy Fox here, whose musical career has been complicated, if not outright thwarted, at every stage by his genius older brother.)

Morowitz, sensing a hidden gem on his hands, got the album in front of Seymour Stein, the iconic founder of Sire Records, a music industry rainmaker who discovered everyone from the Ramones to Madonna.

Stein was impressed, and bought Bill an Amtrak ticket to come and play for him in New York. As legend tells it, Bill blew everyone in the room away, playing and singing dozens of gorgeous, polemical songs for Stein while staring him right in the eyes. Stein told Morowitz to develop the third Bill Fox album on behalf of Sire, and Morowitz set about planning the studio recording of the project in New York City.

Suddenly it was really happening for Bill Fox, happening again. He had earned that vanishingly rare thing, the thing you just don’t get in the music industry: a second chance. A hot indie label planning his next album, under the auspices of a music industry hitmaker. Indie magazines providing breathless coverage of his purported genius. And the cherry on top: Fox was scheduled to headline the CMJ Music Festival in New York.

Unfortunately, history would once again repeat itself. Bill refused the help of studio musicians, recording the promised album alone in Kent (a small Ohio town). The label hated the results. He never showed up to the music festival, and stopped returning phone calls. For all intents and purposes, Bill Fox had once again disappeared.

present day bill fox

It’s 2025 now, and Bill Fox is back. Sort of. He gave an interview to Vulture, exchanged emails with Steven Hyden of UpRoxx, and released two albums in the span of one month. If you have followed me this far into the rabbit hole, you won’t be surprised to hear that the albums are outstanding. My favorite of the new songs, from Resonance, is “Meat Factory,” a withering six and a half minute narrative about the blue collar misery of working at the slaughterhouse.

You waddle in an inch of blood
Ain’t no dam can block this flood of the meat factory
All your early childhood hopes
Get mangled in the blades and spokes of the meat factory

Pray someday, an office bench
Will raise you from the smell and stench of the meat factory
Move on at a steady pace
Keep a smile on your face at the meat factory

This song, like so much else from the pen of Bill Fox, takes you back in time. It is shot through with the bluesy, mid-century political folkie sincerity emblematic of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. But it's just better, frankly, than the best of Seeger. It reminds me again of early Dylan, before he swallowed that scene whole and spit it out, coated in snide rockstar irony. (“Judas!”)

This type of song only works when its writer is operating at the highest possible level; thankfully, Bill Fox is an Everest-level songwriter, and his hard-driving lyrics are paired with a world-weary vocal approach that imbues the song with a sense of depth earned through experience that Bill Fox, really, doesn't have. He's never worked at a meat factory. Based on the scant reporting we have, he has worked on and off as a telemarketer for various companies and causes over the last few decades.

Perhaps this quotidian, blue-collar adjacent professional life gave him the insight needed. Perhaps the “meat factory” symbolizes telemarketing, or the music industry, or life writ large. Or perhaps—like John Prine penning the impeccable “Sam Stone”—he is simply an artist-savant of the highest order, capable of accessing and communicating remote perspectives through music.

When you listen to the new Bill Fox songs, something jumps out right away: they sound just like the old Bill Fox songs. In fact, these aren’t “new” songs at all. These are new releases of old songs, all recorded between 1990-2010. It isn’t clear if Bill Fox has recorded anything in the last 15 years. Does that matter? Should that matter?

time, memory, and “new” (old) songs

After discovering Bill Fox at the airport, his music was a constant accompaniment over the coming days. I hit shuffle and kept at least one earbud in for the next week, only removing it when my wife’s immensely generous patience would occasionally run thin.

We stayed in Mount Ida on our Arkansas trip, a tiny town with a population of 1,103 at last census. Mount Ida was chosen for its quartz crystal mines that welcome recreational diggers, but we also took the time to visit an “antique” store there called the Mount Ida Flea Market.

I say “antique” because this business, which appears to literally be the owner-hoarder’s house, is a worn-down structure whose rooms are stacked to the ceiling with random, rusted, and torn accoutrement of varying origin. Much of the stock was “antique” only in the sense that it was old. Some of it wasn’t even that old. There was a room dedicated entirely to vinyl and, for some reason, empty soda bottles.

At first I was turned off by the disorganized nature of the store, so unlike the heavily-curated, aesthetically manicured vintage shops that adorn the yuppie streets of Los Angeles. But as I ventured deeper into the store, guided by the soothing lo-fi trauma melodies of Bill Fox, my perspective shifted.

In the back of the store, I opened a little drawer to find a veritable trove of old documents: bank slips from the 1920s, telegrams from the 1930s. For reasons I can hardly explain, I found these little bites of history—the telegrams in particular—quite moving.

I guess what I mean to say is that this telegram is proof that 1936 was a real year, that there were real people there, experiencing real things. Love, loss, annoyance and pleasure. My grasp of the past is so thoroughly mediated by history books and TV shows; it's easy to forget that for billions of people, 1936 was just a year in their life. A point in their experience of time. This telegram is proof that there was a person named Ray, leaving someone named Martha Bayer, due to arrive in Pennsylvania the next day. Even now, it takes my breath away. Does that make sense?

The French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that “spatialized time”—the time of clocks, the time of science, the time of carefully demarcated intervals—does not reflect our actual experience of time. Instead our experience of time is subjective, qualitative. Think of the way an hour feels when it’s spent with friends, and the way an hour feels when it’s spent at the dentist’s office.

For Bergson, time is a constant, indivisible flow, something he called duration, or durée, and it is indelibly tied to consciousness and memory. The past is not dead, on Bergson’s view, nor is it stuck in the “past.” Our memories are stored in our consciousness, and when we access them we also actualize them, bringing them into our experience of the present.

As humans we have a tendency to subjugate the past in favor of the present. Of course we bury the bad stuff, the trauma. But we minimize the good memories as well, whether or not we mean too. We try not to dwell too much on our good experiences; doing so could get in the way of developing and experiencing new ones. We are taught to avoid reverie. We are taught that our memories are epistemically questionable; they might not even be accurate. Bergson argues instead that memories play a crucial role in our construction of the present, indeed in our construction and experience of reality.

I cannot access the memories that surrounded the sending of this telegram. And its brevity and abstracted detail makes it impossible to contextualize in an accurate, meaningful way. I can only wonder about the lives hidden beneath the words. But it reminds me that those lives exist, that Ray and Martha were both embodied, conscious beings with personalized access to Bergson’s mystical realm of “pure memory.”

And the songs of Bill Fox? These old songs, delivered to us as if they were new? These have heft, substance, detail. When Fox sings about the “chains of love” put on him, he cracks open a window into his world of memory and meaning. It is not “bad” that these songs are old. In sharing them with me he has actualized the past, brought these memories into the present. Crucially, these are not re-recorded tracks. These are pure memories, imminence and vitality fully intact. And they are so wonderfully rendered—so detailed in their emotions, in their polemic.

There is a raw, transportive essence to the music that Bill Fox releases, whenever and however he chooses to release it. I hope that continues to write and record songs, and I hope that he gives his small but obsessive audience the opportunity to hear them. He is a cult hero to me and at least a few thousand others. Most of all I hope that his restless soul is able to find some happiness and peace in the light of his immense artistic accomplishments.

David Berman first achieved cult notoriety in the mid-90s, as the mastermind of the Silver Jews, the band he started in 1989 with Stephen Malkmus (of Pavement). Over the next nineteen years, Berman cycled different figures through the Silver Jews, released a handful of classics, tried to kill himself, reconnected to his Judaism, got married, and abused a litany of hard drugs.

After disbanding the Silver Jews in 2008, Berman effectively disappeared from the public eye for ten years. When he arrived back on the scene in 2019, he had a new band, the Purple Mountains, composed of Berman and the members of a folk-rock outfit called The Woods. As always, Berman’s new band was a one-man showcase for his songwriting, with the lyrics front and center. He sang dense, witty, and punishingly dark songs over upbeat indie rock with country or Americana inflections.

Although Berman arose out of the 90s indie-rock primordial soup, and thus shares some sonic heritage with Pavement (obviously), Modest Mouse, and Yo La Tengo, I think his songwriting hews closer to the “bad” singer bards of the 20th century, specifically Townes Van Zandt and Leonard Cohen.

The self-titled album Purple Mountains was released on July 12th, 2019. On August 7th, 2019, David Berman killed himself.

In the coming months, I will be writing more about David Berman the songwriter and David Berman the Jew. For now, I will take a narrower focus, and write about two songs that scan today as painful exordia to the end of his life. First, “Nights That Won’t Happen:”

Purple Mountains features Berman in a focused mode as a songwriter. “Nights That Won’t Happen” takes the form of a concentrated philosophical statement on mortality and the afterlife.

The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind
When the here and the hereafter momentarily align
See the need to speed into the lead suddenly declined
The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind

And as much as we might like to seize the reel and hit rewind
Or quicken our pursuit of what we're guaranteed to find
When the dying's finally done and the suffering subsides
All the suffering gets done by the ones we leave behind
All the suffering gets done by the ones we leave behind

Berman’s directness works to great effect on “Nights That Won’t Happen,” as he delivers a straightforward message: the dead do not suffer. Interestingly, there is a line here that scans as anti-suicidal, when Berman describes the (implicitly foolish) desire to quicken our pursuit of what we’re guaranteed to find. We’re all going to die anyways, so what’s the rush?

My read on the song’s third verse, however, leans the other way.

Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night
Have no doubt about it, hon, the dead will do alright
Go contemplate the evidence and I guarantee you'll find
The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind

We start with a wonderful bit of mystical dualism. Ghosts are not ghosts as we traditionally understand them. Berman poses them as soul-boxes, stripped of their content, dreaming of the souls they used to hold within.

Given that Berman had already survived one suicide attempt, the rest of the verse scans as directly suicidal. The inclusion of “hon,” which romanticizes (or at least familiarizes) the subject/listener, makes it all the more crushing. Berman is telling the listener that he/she should find some peace in his eventual death. After all, he will have known exactly what he was doing.

Well, I don't like talkin' to myself
But someone's gotta say it, hell
I mean, things have not been going well
This time I think I finally fucked myself

You see, the life I live is sickening
I spent a decade playing chicken with oblivion
Day to day, I'm neck and neck with giving in
I'm the same old wreck I've always been

Ever the humorist, “That’s Just The Way That I Feel”—the album’s opener—is one of Berman’s flat-out funniest songs. But you take a peek beneath the hood, and things quickly turn pitch-black. This is a lifelong addict, singing about his tendency to play “chicken with oblivion.” And day to day, he’s “neck and neck” with giving in.

I met failure in Australia
I fell ill in Illinois
I nearly lost my genitalia
To an anthill in Des Moines

I was so far gone in Fargo
South Dakota got annoyed
That's the shit I'm talkin' 'bout
When I talk to you about
Ceaseless feasts of schadenfreude

The aforementioned TVZ connection comes through loud and clear in this verse. Listen to “Big Country Blues,” the anti-“Ramblin’ Man,” where Townes mourns the displaced nature of a life on the road.

Spent a lonesome month in Maine and a year in Louisian’
Packed my bags and hit the Westward Trail
Rambled down through Texas 'til I came to El Paso
Spent a week in a stinkin' Juarez jail

The difference here is tonal. Where Townes struck his usual pose of addict nihilism (or stoicism), Berman was a metacognitive goofball. He held himself at arm’s length: close enough for examination, but with enough distance to poke fun. At the core of each song, I think, is the same idea. To borrow from a dumb self-help book I’ll never read: Wherever you go, there you are.

And a setback can be a setup
For a comeback if you don't let up
But this kind of hurtin' won't heal…

There is a dizzying logic to this lead-in stanza, but you have to look closely to understand what he’s saying. If you aren’t careful, if you don’t watch out, your setback can become a setup for a comeback. Here we need to take a step back, and contextualize the stanza in Berman’s life. A former (albeit reluctant) rockstar, with an adoring fanbase, has spent the last decade hiding from the spotlight. His wife leaves him, and maybe he relapses—or doesn’t, but knows a relapse is possible.

He’s hitting rock bottom, or damn close. In this light, we can translate the stanza from Bermanese to English: If you aren’t careful, your “rock bottom” breakup/relapse will eventually lead to you becoming an indie rockstar again.

Isn’t a comeback a good thing? For an infamously depressive recluse…maybe not. Maybe the comeback was a bad idea. Maybe he didn’t wish to be famous; maybe he didn’t wish to be perceived. However tempting this idea, I think it’s too simplistic. If you read about Berman, listen to those who knew him best, he was a deeply personable and kind friend in private. He loved hearing from fans, and wrote countless letters to well-wishers and advice-seekers. And there was clearly an intense, unending desire to create and share his art. A desire to live, to make, to experience.

And the end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
The end of all wanting
Is all I've been wanting
And that's just the way that I feel

The song’s chorus, which repeats at the close, is almost too much to bear in context. Could he have said it any plainer? At the time of writing this song, at least, he wanted to die. And die he did, checking out of this world by his own hand, having spent the same amount of time—52 years—on Earth as Townes Van Zandt.

I know that this type of analysis is gloomy, bordering on macabre. The tendency to hallow a dead artist’s final songs, to treat David Berman’s final songs as suicide notes, doesn’t always come from a good place. But in the case of the elliptically brilliant and ever-mordant Berman, I find it inescapable. I think it’s in the songs, in the lines, in the words.

In an ideal world, David Berman would have found a great therapist, or rabbi, or a new girlfriend, or found some peace in a regimen of Lexapro and melatonin. It is truly horrible and tragic that he felt a need to—in his own words—quicken his pursuit of what we’re guaranteed to find. But a half-decade later, as I pick through his lyrics to extract wisdom if not comfort, I think I have found some of both in “Nights That Won’t Happen.”