Footnotes

1. Insert tabs here ↩

2. This song was conceived as the opening song of this album, and so borrows language from screenplay to make the point. Originally I had planned to do it a cappella, especially inspired by the way Aeofie O’Donovan opens her 2024 song All My Friends. These lyrics existed for a while mapped onto that melody until the guitar/vocal line we hear today bubbled up. It was the first song, and some of the first notes, played out of a new guitar I bought on my birthday in 2024. ↩

3. We are in the city of Atlanta. That’s where I wrote these songs. I’d love to write something a little more “about the city” a la Pulaski at Night by Andrew Bird, or The Ambassador by Gabriel Kahane (or countless others). This song didn’t end up going that way, but I still really like anchoring my music to a physical location. It feels like it makes it a little more real in an age where the internet sort of flattens everything into a single location (nowhere) ↩

4. I have wanted to write about I-20 since I was a teenager. Correction: I have been writing about I-20 since I was a teenager. This is the first song to make it to print. Spending my adolescence in the suburbs of Atlanta, it has been a symbol of so much: freedom, adulthood, “going outside the pride lands” - I also find it interesting that instead of a body of water that the city is organized around, Atlanta is sort of organized around these interstates cutting through it. Ultimately, this makes it sort of an anti-river. An un-natural channel cutting through the city. While the rail lines of Terminus and Marthasville where existing structures that Atlanta organized itself around, the interstate highways were not at all accidental. The ways in which they empower some, displace others, take a psychic toll, make them a fascinating object of inspiration for writing about … social isolation, which is ultimately what we jump off to explore from here. ↩

5. If the title of the album was not “In The Dark” it would probably be something lifted out of this line. The metaphor of cars on the interstate is one I find very potent for describing the atomized state we often are driven into. We are all traveling together, but we are separated into boxes, unable to meaningfully interact with each other, despite our shared circumstances. ↩

6. Many artists have inspired me here to attempt to lay out a new part of the song without the vocal melody (the maximal arrangement here I really credit to Sufjan Stevens, Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes). What I am attempting to do here is to create enough intrigue for the listener to stick around for payoff later in the song.

   Additionally, the sound-painting that I am trying to evoke is the feeling of being near a quiet set of railroad tracks and suddenly, a train comes whooshing by creating an entirely different chaotic aural atmosphere. This is something I experienced often living, for a few years, next to an active commercial rail near the train yards in Northwest Atlanta. You get used to the sound, but you don’t forget about it. The sound of the Casiotone keyboard is, as Lauren remarked, sounds an awful lot like a train horn incoming with its slightly-flattened tuning. That is the sound that opens the song as well. Underneath all the noise, the train is approaching. ↩

7. Continuing screenplay-language, we cut to another transit icon of Atlanta: its airport. Somewhere in the drafts for this song lie the bad wordplay “hearts field” - you are spared for now. ↩

8. Highways… airlines… these means of transportation are wrapped thick with commercial interests. To me this feels like a corruption of some of their natural counterparts: foot-trails… rivers… ↩

9. This is a reference to the Catholic hymn/prayer ”All Creatures of Our God and King” and an attempt to wrap up the confused natural/unnatural elements we’ve explored in this verse. An omnipotent All Knowing Designer certainly wouldn’t be limited to the natural world, but even granting that omnipotence, are these corruptions part of the design too?

   If nothing else, the questions themselves add to the cracks in confident faith that give way to the down-spiraling that we continue exploring through the rest of this album ↩

10. there is something else I wanted to say about text/sound-painting here… erm. Stillness and trains. Oh! The dreams. So, recall the album art here. In honesty of the artistic process, it was selected well after the writing and recording of all this, however I am retroactively hoping that part of the effect here is the sort of drowsy sleep into the nightmare. This section is meant to be a dream-world of the first section. An indecipherable wall of noise that is hard to take all at once. Is it falling asleep or waking up? The point is that it’s hard to tell, which is a lack of grip that makes it more difficult to parse logical truth from exaggerated ones. ↩

11. This lyric is quoting David Foster Wallace: “How odd that I can have all of this inside me, and to you it’s just words?” — This is a line that has long been dormant in my notes and was one of the seeds for the organizing themes of this whole album. In trying to figure out what lyric could emerge out of this section, I decided to just say it outright. ↩

12. Cutting one final time to a home of a remote worker. This is no condemnation of remote-work, a perk that many benefit from in real tangible ways. However, as an observation of isolating mechanisms in our world, it’s hard to ignore. ↩

13. I’ve written about small-talk before as a Good Thing, Actually, but here I’m humoring the oft-quoted argument that small talk is boring, and indeed, sometimes it is boring chatter that doesn’t make a connection. I think this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy especially when one party believes there is not a form of connective small talk. This line tees up this societal dark pattern that allows for a bystander effect in the next line. ↩

14. Attempting to bring us full circle here with the transit metaphors. In other words here, when we believe that we cannot help someone, and that we cannot be helped, we have constructed the barriers ourselves. These are not naturally occurring divisions, yet we cement them into our shared understanding of the world by repeating them. Anyways, this is meant to tee up the next song which fully humors this argument of inherent isolation, asking the question, how could we possibly ever make a real connection with someone when we are inherently disconnected from one another’s experiences? And again, before we proceed, I hope the album art helps clue you into this being an exploration of these monster-thoughts. Perversions of the truth that, when safely explored, maybe we find that we can understand their shape, and maybe rise above them. If I can quote another great writer, Anton Chekhov, who describes one function of art to be that… “[it] doesn’t have to solve a problem, it just has to formulate it correctly.” If I can invoke one more source of inspiration before we end: that quote is via George Saunders who has been my sherpa of Chekhov and all things writing since I read his book A Swim In The Pond In The Rain. ↩