Maybe I’d say it’s a record for coming up or coming down. But there’s nothing else I could point to. I mean I was listening to stuff in the van - I listened to a lot of Genesis records. Last year was probably the least I’ve listened to music in my adult life. I wasn’t even listening to music when I made it. And there’s not a lot of musical influences on the record. Mostly it just comes from being bummed out.
The songs don’t really deal with any political or personal or social issues at all. But in the city it’s like scoring drugs, you’ve got to score your tranquil situations. Which are beautiful, they’re one of God’s finest creations - I’m not talking shit about the Rocky Mountains. It’s not a la carte like it is in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. I need to hear the neighbors yelling really fucking loud at each other in the middle of the night. I need to be able to buy a taco at two in the morning. I need to hear people outside of my window trying to buy crack. I appreciate nature, I appreciate driving through nature, but you put me in a campsite for more than two days and I’ll flip the fuck out. So I’ve fallen in love with Chicago pretty hard over the past year, despite crippling depression. The amount of imperfection in this city is really perfect. But that’s what I’m used to, that’s what I like. And everything here looks like it’s about to break. And in the summer when it really heats up it’s extra garbage-canny. It looks gray, there’s not a lot of color, and I find a lot of radiance in that. There’s so many weird twists about it: the way that street lights look here is really peculiar, and a really bleak sense when you walk around. More than ever I’m just finding little details about it that I love. That’s the sound of Chicago to me.Ĭhicago. This record is the sound of walking home late at night through Chicago in the middle of winter and being half-creeped out, scared someone’s going to punch you in the back of the head, and half in the most tranquil state you’ve been in all day, enjoying the quiet and this faint wind, and buses going by on all-night routes. And landlords knocking on doors to get rent that people don’t have. It’s the sound of strangers dodging one another. Everybody who talks to you on the street’s always got something they’re coming at you with. That’s the sound I hear, all the time, ringing in my ears. Chicago sounds like a train constantly coming towards you but never arriving. And I think I succeeded in that way - it’s got some weird instrumentation on there, and some surreal far-out words.Īnd it’s more Chicago-y sounding. I was always trying to make something like this I guess, trying to catch up with my imagination. I just wanted to make something weird and far-out that came from the heart finally. I didn’t want to be jammy acoustic guy anymore. I wanted to make something deep-fried and more me-sounding. I was under a lot of stress because I was trying to make an anti-folk record and I was having trouble doing it. I went in expecting to make a fucking masterpiece, but I kept hitting a brick wall. I went in with over-confidence, I went in there like ‘Yeah, I’m ready to go!’ but I was just kind of bullshitting. It took a year, and there were a lot of times I thought it was going nowhere, a lot of botched sessions.
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