Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Night of My 50s IV, 7/24/26: Am I Bisexual?

The locus of action is always in motion.

— Erving Goffman

This one goes to out to somebody watching tonight. She knows who she is.

— Bob Dylan

“Come on, baby, let’s rock and roll.”
— Michael Knott

Rock and roll motherfucking rules.

It just does.

Music in general rules. Live music rules even harder. I love almost every kind of music there is, from Appalachian folk to Georgian polyphony, from Miles Davis to Papa M, although admittedly not always in equal measure. Music has been one of the great organizing forces of my life for as long as I can remember. It has rescued bad days, elevated good ones, carried me through grief, celebrated victories, and made long train rides, lonely hotel rooms, and empty apartments feel just a little less empty. If today’s essay seems to wander off in musical directions more often than usual, that’s because today belongs to music.

The last couple of days have been filled with minor crises, accumulated errands, and one rather difficult conversation with my mother that I’ll briefly update readers on in a moment. None of these problems were especially serious in isolation. Collectively, however, they had begun to clutter the landscape of my mind. I woke up this morning with an unusually simple goal: clear away the small stuff, stay close to the hotel, listen to music, write, and otherwise leave myself alone.

There were still a handful of practical matters that needed attention. I’d been meaning to buy a new pair of headphones for several days. My hair was beginning to reach the point where even I had to admit it probably needed cutting. More importantly, ever since returning to Japan six weeks ago, my phone’s SIM card had been behaving erratically. The hotel Wi-Fi had been excellent, as Japanese hotel Wi-Fi almost always is, but every time I stepped outside I was reminded that “mostly functional” isn’t really functional at all. Since I’m planning to leave Japan again later this summer, I knew I couldn’t keep putting it off. Today I had a two o’clock appointment at the nearby SoftBank store, barely a three-minute walk from the hotel. The haircut could wait. The headphones could wait. The SIM card could not.

Readers of yesterday’s essay may be wondering about my mother and me. After our rather tense exchange yesterday morning, we exchanged messages later in the day. We still see a number of things differently, particularly regarding my writing and my dating life, and I doubt those differences will disappear anytime soon. On the other hand, we also love each other very much, and hopefully neither of us has any interest in staying angry for long. Families have disagreements. Good families keep talking anyway. I suspect that’s where we’re headed.

The same goes for Litz and me.

After nearly a month of trying to coordinate our schedules, we’re still trying. Unfortunately, her work situation remains remarkably unpredictable. She’s effectively working under a zero-hour arrangement, which totally sucks, which means an off day that appears available for her to travel one day can disappear the next. We’d hoped to meet in Takamatsu, roughly halfway between Kochi and Kyoto, but another last-minute change at work forced us to postpone yet again. We were both disappointed, but neither of us blamed the other. Sometimes life simply refuses to cooperate. We’ll keep talking, keep laughing, and eventually the calendars will line up. If they don’t before I leave for Thailand and then Spokane later this summer, we’ll simply keep doing what we’ve been doing remarkably well for months now: staying close despite the distance.

Once those thoughts were out of the way, the day became pleasantly ordinary.

II: Afternoon

I left the hotel a little before two carrying both my residence card and my My Number card, even though SoftBank had only asked me to bring one. Years of dealing with paperwork have taught me that bringing too much identification is infinitely preferable to bringing too little.

The walk to the station took only a couple of minutes. As usual, I finished a cigarette on the way, tossed it before entering, and descended into the cool underground passage. Every Japanese station seems to have its own invisible weather system. Long before you see the platform, you feel the wind. Part of it comes from the enormous ventilation system. Part of it comes from the trains themselves, which push columns of air through the tunnels like giant pistons every time they arrive. Whatever the engineering explanation, it always feels faintly magical. Before you hear the train, before you see another passenger, the station announces itself with moving air.

The appointment itself took exactly eight minutes.

The young SoftBank employee helping me wore a SoftBank Hawks baseball jersey instead of an office shirt, complete with a day’s worth of black stubble. For reasons I can’t quite explain, the whole thing struck me as perfectly Japanese. Professional without being overly formal. Efficient without pretending to be important. He checked my identification, installed the new SIM, and, naturally, it didn’t work right away. We both stared at the screen for a few seconds before I restarted the phone. It restarted almost instantly, found the network, and returned to life.

Problem solved. It’s funny how satisfying it is to cross one genuinely useful task off your list.

Afterwards I wandered no farther than the immediate neighborhood around the hotel. I stopped by a drugstore and a Lawson to purchase provisions. By the time I walked back through the hotel doors, less than forty minutes had passed since I’d left. The room was cool. The new SIM card worked. The refrigerator was full. The errands were finished. For the first time in several days, there was nothing left to do except what I’d wanted to do all along. Listen to music. Write my essays. Do my job.

Every now and then, simply sit there and enjoy the fact that not every thought requires action, not every errand deserves urgency, and not every day has to become an adventure. Sometimes crossing three small things off the list is more than enough. From there, all that’s left is to press play.

There were still a couple of unanswered questions hanging over the afternoon. My son might text. If he did, we’d decide whether to meet in Kyoto tomorrow evening before I returned to what has unexpectedly become my little base camp here in Osaka.

Litz was still trying to untangle her work schedule. We’ve become surprisingly good at living with uncertainty, talking several times a day while waiting for circumstances to cooperate. By Sunday evening I should have a much clearer idea whether we’ll finally meet before I leave Japan again or whether Thailand will arrive first.

I sat down to today’s journal. As I’ve mentioned before, this daily series is still brand new, but I’m working harder on it than almost anything I’ve written in quite a while. The response so far has been encouraging. Whether it eventually approaches the readership of my St. George’s series remains to be seen, but I’m quietly hopeful.

The St. George’s essays continue to surprise me. For reasons I still don’t completely understand, that series gradually climbed Google’s rankings until searches for “St. George’s Spokane History” began returning my essays near the very top of the page, sometimes directly beneath Wikipedia and occasionally even ahead of the school’s own website.

I find this oddly gratifying.

For the first several years of The Kyoto Kibbitzer, I cross-posted almost everything to Medium with very little success. I did almost no search-engine optimization, almost no promotion, and almost all of my readership came through Facebook and WordPress. Then, almost without warning, the St. George’s pieces found an audience.

I’d like to think that somewhere along the way some perspective parents trying to learn about the history of the school may have stumbled across my recollections instead. If this is true, it makes me smile.

The series is affectionate. It’s nostalgic. But it’s also honest. I attended St. George’s from 1980 until 1992, and schools in the 1980s operated according to a very different set of expectations than schools today. Discipline was different. Student life was different. The relationships between students and teachers were different. Sexual mores were different. My only goal was to reflect those years as accurately and fairly as I could.

Whether readers agreed with every conclusion hardly mattered. They read the stories. For that, I’ll always be grateful. As soon as I began thinking about today’s essay, I knew I was going to start with music.

Music has been one of the central joys of my life for as long as I can remember.

As a young boy I wanted to learn the piano. I asked my mother several times if I could take lessons, however she replied that she could not afford them at the time. A few years later my parents’ financial situation improved enough that my younger brother Mike was able to study the cello for several years. He eventually became an excellent young player before other interests gradually took over. I was genuinely happy for him, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed that I’d missed my chance.

Over time I got over it, however in the back of my mind I always to learn to play.

After a major change in my work circumstances in 2018, I finally bought myself an inexpensive electronic keyboard and decided that, instead of taking formal lessons, I’d simply see how much I could teach myself. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than a chord-finder app and an unreasonable amount of free time, I slowly made a little progress, and was able to read and play several simple pieces.

I only performed publicly once—if “publicly” is the right word. A friend named Mela, whom I’d met through the wonderful and sadly now defunct Periscope app, eventually persuaded me to play two songs over the phone. I stumbled my way through “Someone I Care About” by the Modern Lovers and then attempted Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Ocean Rain.” As I’ve written elsewhere, I didn’t exactly dominate Ocean Rain. But it was at least passable. Mela applauded politely, and for one brief afternoon I felt like I’d accomplished something I’d wanted to do since childhood.

After playing for Mela, I began lose interest in the keyboard. I was never going to be good to play in public, and playing for Mela was a lot of fun. I decided to go out on a high note. Sometimes achieving a childhood dream doesn’t require becoming great at it. Sometimes it’s enough simply to discover that the dream itself was real.

III. A Lifetime of Listening

I have listened to music everyday for 38 years since 1988. Music is simply part of the furniture of my life. Like everyone else, there are genres I return to almost every day and genres I will never listen to again. Even so, with remarkably few exceptions, I can usually find at least one artist in almost every style that I genuinely admire. There are even bands—Genesis immediately comes to mind—that I respect enormously while almost never choosing to play them. Great musicianship and personal taste are not always the same thing, and I’ve become more comfortable with that distinction as I’ve gotten older.

Perhaps because I never learned to play an instrument as a child, I became obsessed with listening to music instead. By the time I was fourteen, I was spending every spare dollar I could scrape together on cassettes, and then, almost overnight, CDs when they replaced cassettes as the dominant medium. Looking back, I probably should have tried to some of my money. Instead, I spent virtually all of it on music.

I have absolutely no regrets.

Music became my education. It taught me geography, history, politics, religion, literature, relationships, heartbreak, humor, and more than a little philosophy. Long before streaming services provided almost every song ever recorded, discovering a great new band required effort. Somebody recommended them. You took a chance. You saved your money. You bought the record. If you loved it, it became part of your life.

Some artists from my teenage years have stayed with me. Others have not. This is OK with me.

The first cassette I ever bought with my own money was Martika’s self-titled debut. I haven’t listened to it in decades, but I don’t regret buying it for a second. It was the beginning of a lifetime spent chasing songs.

Soon enough my classmates introduced me to bands like R.E.M., the Violent Femmes and Fine Young Cannibals. Before long I discovered Bob Dylan and the Replacements on my own, and after that there was no turning back.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton College in the fall of 1992, I was already spending almost every extra dollar on music. That habit has never really gone away. Today my Spotify library contains thousands of liked songs spanning almost every genre imaginable.

By the time I arrived at Hamilton music had become a major part of my life. I was into artists such as Bob Dylan, the Replacements, The Pogues, Dire Straits, R.E.M, the Violent Femmes, and several others. Many of my favorite bands would soon come to be described as alternative or indie rock. Looking back, I was only beginning to scratch the surface.

One of roommates freshman year, Jake, loved music almost as much as I did, although his tastes tended to run in a more traditional direction. The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks were his touchstones, and before long they became mine as well. We spent countless hours listening to records in our quad, arguing over songs, recommending albums to one another, and gradually building the sort of musical vocabulary that only develops when people live together and have far too much free time.

Next door lived Ian Murphy. Ian remains one of my closest friends to this day, and he is the only person I have ever met who knows more about music than I do.

That is not a sentence I write lightly. I’ve spent most of my adult life buying and listening to records, reading about records, ranking records, writing about records, and generally annoying other people by going on and on about. Over the years I’ve accumulated many thousands of CDs and listened to what must be hundreds of thousands of songs. Music has never really been a hobby for me. It’s simply part of the way I move through the world.

Ian somehow manages to go even further. When we first met, he introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, many of whom I may not have discovered on my own. Luna immediately became one of my favorite bands of all time. He also pointed me toward the Auteurs, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, This Mortal Coil, Ride, and dozens of other artists, particularly from Britain’s remarkable alternative scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Some of those bands became lifelong companions. Others I admired without ever fully embracing. All of them expanded my musical horizons.

What impressed me most, however, wasn’t simply the breadth of Ian’s knowledge. It was his curiosity.

Ian has always approached music the way an historian approaches a historical period or a scientist approaches a research question. He doesn’t merely listen to an artist. He disappears into them. If Nick Cave captures his imagination, he’ll spend months tracing every album, every collaboration, every side project, every live recording, and every obscure appearance he can find. More recently he’s done the same thing with classic country artists such as Merle Haggard and Steve Earle—a development that amuses me slightly, since I can still remember him gently teasing me about my own love of country back in college.

We continue to recommend records to each other today. I honestly can’t imagine what my musical life would look like if I’d never met him.

IV: Musical Genres I Like I Folk/ Americana

My favorite musical genre, without question, is folk music and its close cousin, Americana. Looking back, I suspect I know why.

When I was about six years old I discovered my parents’ tiny record collection. For reasons I still can’t explain, I pulled out an old folk compilation with the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” on it. I played it over and over again in our living room. Not long afterwards I also found a Joan Baez record, and fell hopelessly in love with “Sweet Sunny South.” I had no idea what the lyrics meant. I just knew I wanted to hear the song again.


By about 2010, like many people as they begin to age, my ability to keep up with new bands began to wane somewhat. I did my best to keep up with the bands that I already knew and loved, however I found myself becoming less omnivorous in my listening. In the last couple of years, with the help of Spotify, I have endeavored to change this, and I’ve discovered dozens and dozens of new artists and bands that I really like.

Among my favourite folk and Americana artists are, in no particular order, Phosphorescent, Whiskeytown, Ryan Adams, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo and Conor Oberst.

I’ve only seen Phosphorescent and Wilco live. Whiskeytown no longer exists, Ryan Adams still tours, and Uncle Tupelo eventually split into Wilco and Son Volt. These days I probably listen to Son Volt more than I once did, but Wilco remains my favourite of the two.

I’ll never stop listening.

V: Musical Genres I Like II Indie

Alternative and indie rock became the soundtrack of my teenage years.

As I mentioned earlier, I inherited my classmates’ love of bands like R.E.M. and Violent Femmes. I discovered The Replacements on my own, and they remain one of my favourite bands of all time.

Some of my favourite indie artists today include Happiness, Daddy Issues, Giant Drag, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Afghan Whigs, Luna, Car Seat Headrest, Yo La Tengo, Seam and many others.

Like folk music, indie has been a constant companion for almost forty years. I can’t imagine that changing.

I also love jazz and ambient music, but those are enormous subjects that deserve essays of their own.

VI: Musical Genres I Do Not Like

Then there are the genres I do not like. Mainstream hard rock has never really appealed to me. Bon Jovi and Van Halen simply aren’t my thing. Grunge is more complicated. I admired what bands like Soundgarden and Alice in Chains are trying to doing, but I just don’t like him.


I don’t especially like heavy metal, although I do like several glam metal bands, probably because glam metal becoming popular, right when I was an early teenager and really listening to music for the first time. My favorite of these are Cinderella and Poison and I still have a soft spot Skid Row.

Then there is Progressive Rock or Prog. Prog and I have simply never gotten along.

Yes leaves me cold. Kansas does absolutely nothing for me. Toto has me running for the hills. And Genesis deserves special mention.

Many years ago I wrote what I thought was an entirely harmless one-star Amazon review of the Genesis album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I assumed perhaps three people would read it. Apparently every Genesis fan on Earth was one of those three people.

The abuse began almost immediately. It turned out that among the hundreds of glowing reviews of the record, mine was the lone dissenting voice. For weeks strangers explained, in increasingly colorful language, exactly why I was an idiot. Eventually I deleted the review, not because I had changed my mind, but because I was just sick of the whole thing. I still don’t like the album.

VII. Evening: My Evolving Sexuality

Between about 7 and 10 PM I spent nearly three hours staring at what might have been the worst website ever designed.

It was supposedly the best escort aggregator in Osaka. It certainly aggregated everything. Hundreds of women. Dozens of agencies. Flashing banners. Pop-ups. Prices that changed the moment you clicked through. Every page had to be translated, and every time I went back it reverted to Japanese and I had to translate it again. After a while I wasn’t browsing anymore. I was wrestling with the website.

Eventually I admitted defeat.

The practical lesson was simple enough. If I wanted reasonable prices, I was probably going to have to get over my preference for outcalls and start looking at incalls instead. Fair enough. That was useful information. Three hours for one sentence.

Then, just as I was about to give up entirely, two completely unrelated things happened.

The first was my friend Doug in China. He messaged to say he’d finally finished my recently published novel The Adventures of The Thin Man and Andrea.

His note was everything a novelist hopes to hear. He hadn’t read it as “Matt playing the Thin Man.” He’d read it as a fully realized novel that happened to contain pieces of me. That was probably the single nicest compliment anyone could have paid me. I had been wandering around wondering whether the evening had been wasted, and suddenly it didn’t matter anymore. Doug had already given me something far better.

=====

When I was six and seven years old I was badly abused by my aunt’s first husband. I detail these experiences here. Childhood sexual abuse is the worst, and this fucking guy is simply the biggest dick imaginable. Fuck off.

It has taken me more than forty years to overcome some the effects of the abuse. This may seem like a long time ago, however this is just how CSA works. It sucks. So hard. One of the major effects was my eventual questioning of my sexuality. Around the time I hit puberty at 14 to the ago of 16 I wondered if I was gay. I was deeply attracted to girls, however the gay idea was never far from my mind.

By the time I was sixteen I had begun dating girls, however awkwardly, and my thoughts that I might be gay gradually faded into the background.

Throughout my marriage, two affairs, and a few other relationships, I remained consistently attracted to women. I never seriously thought of myself as gay. Even so, the question never disappeared entirely. It simply became quieter.

A few years ago I found myself occasionally turning to pornography featuring trans women. My favorite actress is Daisy Taylor, who is so gorgeous and whose picture leads this essay. It isn’t perhaps my favorite genre, but I kept returning to it often enough that I eventually stopped dismissing it as a curiosity.

Eventually mere curiosity became practical curiosity. Over the past six weeks I have booked four escorts here in Osaka, all biological women. Tonight, I found myself browsing agencies that advertised trans women.

The first woman that caught my eye was Mio. She was purely feminine in appearance and was absolutely stunning. Sadly however, she was working in a different city and not available in Osaka tonight.

Then I saw Takane. She was also very beautiful, and looked like a women, however perhaps ever so slightly androgynous. Three years earlier I probably would have clicked away without another thought. This time I found myself thinking, why not?

Then I remembered the great John McAfee, the software pioneer who is totally outta control. Years ago, while happily disappearing down one of my periodic McAfee rabbit holes, I came across an interview—I think it was an interview, although it may have been buried somewhere in the fragments of the autobiography he never finished.

The interviewer asked him about dating trans women in Thailand. Were they actually woman, the interviewer asked?

McAfee shrugged it off.

“Dude,” he said, “trust me. They’re all woman.” Hilarious.

Whether you agree with him or not isn’t really the point. For some reason, trying to book a trans escort in my hotel room years later, that line floated back into my head.

So I rolled the dice, as I sometimes do, and called her agency. Not because I had reached some grand philosophical conclusion. Because curiosity had quietly outrun hesitation. I was ready to spend more than I’d planned and just see what happened. The guy from the agency quoted me the real outcall price. Thirty-three thousand yen. That ended the experiment rather quickly. I thanked him and said I would call him another if I changed my mind.

VII. Am I Bisexual?

Today, I think I may simply be naturally bisexual. Whether my abuse obscured this truth, complicated my understanding of it, or is largely unrelated, I cannot honestly say.

What I can say is, my sexuality seems to be evolving rather quickly. I really have no idea where this attraction to trans woman is coming, however I do know that I will need to do something sometime soon.

Dedication:

For Takane. And for John McAfee. Baby, you are totally outta control. But man are you funny. Dude, you rock. So damn hard.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Days and Nights of My 50s I: 7/20/26, the Unwritten Libretto.

Author’s Note:

Five days ago, I made what may prove to be the most important professional decision of my life.

For months—years really—I had been thinking about giving up my teaching career and becoming a full-time writer. I have talked to many of my family and friends about this and taken several small steps in this direction. I recently published a novel, have written and published hundreds of essays, and written almost every day for eighteen years. I have hundreds of pages of dream records, journals and letters, some sent and some only in draft form. I am hard at work on the sequel to my first novel, and am currently working on five books with many more in the making.

Over this time I have also become very good at making excuses. School is too busy. Life is complicated. The timing isn’t quite right. Next month. Next term. Next year. One day. It was all true, and yet it barely matters. A few days ago, I finally admitted what had been staring me in the face for a long time: if I wanted to call myself a writer, I had to stop waiting for someone else to make that decision for me. Whether I eventually succeed or fail is almost beside the point. The decision itself changed something in me. I stopped thinking about the life I wished I had and started taking responsibility for the one I actually have.

Today wasn’t the happiest day of my life, nor the saddest. It wasn’t the day I got married, the day my son was born, the day I published my first book, or the day I realized my marriage was ending. Objectively speaking, it was an ordinary Monday in Osaka. I listened to music. I wandered the city. I shared dinner and my bed with a woman whose path happened to cross mine for a couple of hours before diverging forever. By tomorrow morning she would be somewhere else, and so would I. Yet somewhere between checking into a modest hotel, thinking about my future, and sitting alone quietly after she left, something finally clicked. My teaching career is rapidly coming to a close. The marriage that defined most of my adult life is over. The books I dream about haven’t been written yet. The cities I may someday call home are still only possibilities. The people who will matter most over the next twenty years are, at this moment, complete strangers.

For the first time since I was a young man, there is no obvious script. That realization is exhilarating. It is also terrifying. Most of all, it is deeply liberating.

So this seems as good a place as any to begin this series.

Epigraph:

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery.

Anonymous

Anything could happen.

Bash and Pop

I: My General Situation As of Today

For the better part of thirty years, my life had possessed a remarkable amount of structure. I graduated from college. I moved to Japan. I found a teaching career almost by accident and stuck with it for a quarter of a century. I got married, and my wife and I bought a house together in Kyoto. We raised a wonderful son together who we both love more than words can say. We have paid bills, argued over groceries, worried about our dear dog Daisy, taken vacations when we could afford to, and slowly accumulated the ordinary rituals that eventually become a life. There were wonderful years and there were difficult ones, but there was almost always a next step waiting patiently in front of me. Whether I liked the script or not, there was a some kind of a script.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first, it disappeared.

My marriage ended not with a single dramatic explosion but with the gradual realization that two decent people could simply reach the end of the road together. My teaching career, once the defining feature of my adult identity, began to quietly recede into the background. Friends scattered across countries and continents. My parents grew older. I turned fifty-two without feeling especially old, but with the unmistakable sense that I had entered the second half of whatever story remained.

It is a peculiar thing to discover that freedom and uncertainty are twins. For years I imagined freedom as something uncomplicated. Finish work. Write books. Travel. Meet interesting people. Drink coffee in strange cities. Listen to music until two in the morning. Wake up whenever I pleased. Answer to no one.

There is truth in that fantasy. There is another truth as well.

Freedom also means that no one hands you tomorrow. No institution is waiting to promote you. No family obligation automatically determines your next decision. No invisible current carries you downstream. Every meaningful choice becomes your responsibility. Every success belongs to you. Every failure belongs to you too.

That realization can feel less like opening a door than standing on the edge of a cliff. You can step forward. Or you can spend the rest of your life admiring the view. Five days before the evening you’re about to read about, I decided I was done standing still.

I wasn’t retiring, not yet anyway. I wasn’t exactly reinventing myself. I wasn’t chasing some impossible dream. I was simply acknowledging something that had probably been true for twenty years. I am a writer. I feel like I was born to be one. Whether anyone else eventually agrees is, in many ways, beside the point. The work itself has become the destination. Everything else—the cities, the books, the women, the music, the bars, the victories, the humiliations, the friendships, the failures—is simply material for my work.

This series is an attempt to pay attention to the contours of my daily life, in whatever form the may take. And, perhaps for the first time in my life, to trust that the story doesn’t need an outline before it begins.

II: Osaka

Osaka has always felt different to me than Kyoto.

Kyoto is the city where I built my adult life. It is where I have worked, and lived for more than twenty years with my life and son. It is where the mortgage was paid and our dog was walked, where ordinary afternoons quietly accumulated slowly into decades. I know its rhythms inside and out. I know which coffee shops open early, which bridges are worth crossing at sunset, and where to stand beside the Kamogawa when I need to remember that almost everything eventually passes.

Osaka has always been to me something else entirely.

It has never asked me to be responsible. When I come here, I feel somehow lighter. Less like a teacher. Less like a husband. Less like the man who spent twenty-four years inside the same corporate institution. Osaka has always given me permission to become, if only for a day or two, a slightly different version of myself. Not a better man or a worse one. Just someone with fewer expectations resting on his shoulders.

Perhaps every city we visit has a role to play in our lives. Kyoto has been my home. Tokyo has often been a dream. Singapore has long been my favorite escape. Osaka, though, has become my intermission. A place where I can step off the stage for a little while before the next act begins. A place to just get away.

This Monday afternoon I checked into a small APA Hotel not far from Shinsaibashi Station, which I affectionally call Mr. Shin. Like most APA hotels, it is clean, efficient, and just a little too compact. The room isn’t exactly designed for lingering. It is designed for sleeping, showering, and moving on. My suitcase for neatly against one wall. The desk is barely large enough for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The large television in front of my bed I will barely use. It suits my current mood perfectly.

I took a taxi to the hotel from Shin-Osaka Station and arrived around 7:30 PM. I dropped my overnight bag on the floor, drew the curtains apart, and looked out over another slice of Osaka. Nothing spectacular. Just traffic, apartment buildings, and the quiet machinery of a city getting on with its day.

I remember thinking how strange it felt to have absolutely nowhere I needed to be. No lesson to prepare. No meeting to attend. No papers to grade. No one waiting for me at all.

That realization no longer frightened me the way it once might have. It felt… spacious. There are moments in life when freedom announces itself with fireworks. This wasn’t one of them. It arrived almost silently. Like an empty afternoon. Like a city that has never asked me to explain myself. My hotel room is simple. It is what I can afford.

Outside, Osaka continued exactly as it always had. Inside, almost without me realizing it, the next stage of my life had already begun.

III: Meeting Yuki

I should flash back briefly here to introduce my date for the evening. There are evenings that require months of planning. This was not one of them.

The plan, such as it was, consisted of very little. Conversation. Sex. Cigarettes. Dinner. That was enough. As I stepped out of the taxi, I saw her standing quietly on the street.

She was slightly built, dressed in a simple black skirt, and carried herself with the quiet confidence of someone accustomed to meeting complete strangers. There was no dramatic meeting, no cinematic slow motion, no instant thunderbolt. We smiled, introduced ourselves, and within a minute or two were walking side by side into the hotel through the warm Osaka evening as though we had agreed to meet as old friends rather than someone we had never laid eyes on before.

Her name was Yuki.

We went up to my room and made the sort of awkward conversation that strangers always make at first. Where are you from? Where do you live today? Had I been to Osaka often? Was I enjoying the summer?

Nothing remarkable. Which, in retrospect, was itself remarkable. There is something deeply comforting about ordinary conversation. For a little while, neither of us had to be anything more than two people just getting to know each other.

Eventually, because pretending otherwise would have been absurd, the reason we had met entered the conversation. She is thirty-six and works as an escort. I had hired her for the evening.

There is no point dressing those facts up in prettier language. They are neither the whole story nor something I feel any particular need to defend. They simply belong to it. Human lives are untidy. We make decisions for reasons that are sometimes noble, sometimes lonely, sometimes curious, and sometimes impossible even to explain to ourselves. This was one of mine.

I went into the bathroom to wash up, took my clothes off, and hung them neatly on the hangers on the wall. By the time I came out of the bathroom she was naked too. That was what we were there for. I put on one of my favorite bands Whiskeytown, lay back on the bed for a few minutes, listened hard, and let the sweet sweet sounds of Ryan Adams’ voice wash over me. I was, briefly, in heaven.

Then, inevitably, we began to kiss. She is a smoker and tasted like stale tobacco and faintly like green peas. I am a smoker too so I am sure I tasted the same. She unwrapped one of the condoms that I had bought earlier for occasions just like this and began to pleasure me with her mouth. While I do enjoy oral sex to some extent, it is far from my favorite sexual act and I have never been able to cum this way. Not for lack of trying, I simply find that the women who have performed the act on me can never sufficiently been able to get their teeth out of the way. It is not their fault at all, but it is just that simple.

Soon enough, I asked her to climb on top of me. My penis was already erect and she was slick as well, and I entered her cleanly and easily. After a little while, we flipped around and began to engage in the missionary position. I was on the urge of cumming when I pulled out, turned over on my back, and finished my self off with two hands. Nine times out of ten I finish this way if I finish at all. After all, I know my own equipment better than else, so to speak. Before we began to have sex I put on some porn. I chose very quickly as we were on the clock. I selected some perfectly nun priest porn, totally chalk. Of course we both barely watched it as our eyes were mostly closed. The moment I came I toweled off, shut off the porn, and immediately pressed play on the Whiskeytown video I had paused before sex.

Then a funny thing happened. During sex she had repeatedly asked me to turn down the porn and to shush in general. She said we were at a business hotel and that we were bothering the other guests. Although I love to be babied. I do not like to mothered at all. It is just not my thing, and I have written about this at some length here. I already knew that I would not book Yuki again, and this moment helped crystalize my decision. She is sweet and cool, and I am glad I met her for one night, however she is just not my jam. And also, nobody shushes my boy.

Anyway, she asked me to turn my music down. I just laughed and cranked it. Then she laughed too and the mood lifted and passed. Neither of us was yet in the mood for a shower, mostly because we were on the clock and by this point only had about 40 minutes left in our appointment. I did not feel like a round two, so I suggested we head down to the street to smoke for a smoke and then get a little dinner. Although we had less than an hour left and the hotel restaurant was a little busy, she agreed to have dinner with me.

We finished our cigarette and entered the first floor hotel restaurant. We sat down and briefly consulted the menu. The restaurant specializes in pasta, so I ordered tomato pasta with eggplant and she ordered the zucchini linguine. The food took a while to arrive, so halfway through the meal she asked for a doggie bag. I quickly finished my meal and we went upstairs so she could pack her bag.

The evening had never pretended to be anything it wasn’t. Neither of us confused it with romance. Neither of us imagined it was the beginning of some extraordinary love story. It was simply two lives crossing for a few hours before continuing in different directions. There is something quietly beautiful about that too.

Outside, Osaka was still very much alive. Trains rattled somewhere in the distance. Traffic rolled steadily beneath the hotel windows. Thousands of strangers were beginning nights that had nothing to do with ours. Ours, quietly and without complaint, was coming to an end.

I told her I was going to wash up for a minute. She said through the door that she had to leave. I said goodbye babes and she replied in the same fashion. When I came back out, she was already gone.

And I didn’t even kiss her goodbye.

IV: Coda

For most of my adult life, my future had always arrived with an outline. There was always another semester to teach. Another report to write. Another mortgage payment to make. Another family holiday to plan. Another school year waiting just over the horizon. Even when life became difficult, I almost always had a sense of what would come next. The details may change, but the broad shape of the story had already been sketched.

And now it hadn’t.

As I write this the marriage that defined nearly half my life has come to an end. My teaching career, after almost thirty years, is slowly coming to an end. My son is a grown man, trying his best making his own way in the world and earning his own money. My wife and I are immensely proud of him as well we should be. Our house of 19 years will soon belong to someone else. My life is rapidly becoming quite different and everything that had once seemed permanent has become part of the past.

This all may sound just a bit sad. Some of it may be, sure. It also happens to be exhilarating. Tomorrow I might wake up in Kyoto. Next month I might find myself in Singapore. A year from now I may be living in Osaka. Anything could happen.

Perhaps I’ll write ten more books. Perhaps no one will read them. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Perhaps I won’t. There will be close friends I haven’t made yet. There are cities I have not yet wandered. There are songs I haven’t fallen in love with, thank god.

There are mistakes waiting patiently for me. There are joys I cannot yet possibly imagine. For the first time since I was in my early twenties, the next chapter of my life has not yet been written.

As I stood there in that little Osaka hotel room, listening to Whiskeytown waft through the room, I finally understood what life had trying to tell me for days.

My life hadn’t fallen apart. It had, in fact, opened up. And somewhere beyond everything I thought I knew, waiting patiently for me, was the unfinished libretto.

Dedication:

For Yuki. Thanks for a lovely evening. I’ll never see you again, babe. Go with God.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

For Litzy Litz With an I My Babush Baby: A Love Poem 

“Isn’t she / pretty in pink.”
— Richard Butler

Baby, I love you so very much.
And darling, baby, I don’t mean just. 
I mean to ten thousand stars and back again,
And I’ll write this poem like a half-good man.

I’ve done this before and I’ll do it again,
But meeting you, baby, is the biggest win.
The greatest win of my whole strange life.
And someday soon you will be my wife.

Pause. Deep breath, dude. Don’t get all rude.
Spill the beans and spill the tea.
Don’t get all weak in the knees please. 
Baby Litzy, I love you clear to the moon,
And every time I see you, darling, I swoon.

I’ll fall to my knees and beg you please,
Say yes forever and stay with me.
For life, my darling. For all our days.
Forever and ever in every single way. 

And baby I’ll never, ever give you up,
For I am no chump, and I’ve taken my lumps. 

So Litzy, my Babush baby, pause.
Cause baby, just because because.
I’ve written poems since I was eight,
And some were good and some weren’t great.

And that’s the way these things can go.
Sometimes they shine, sometimes they blow.
I wrote for girls who said they were pearls,
Sweet little queens in shiny worlds.

But none were half as sweet as you.
And baby, yes, that much is true.
No candy shop or sugared peach
Could ever come within your reach.

Babush! Lol and OMG.
Baby, darling, can’t you see?
I love you like the bees love honey.
Like Wall Street loves money.

I love you like ships love the sea.
Like tall green forests love the trees.
And baby this may sound absurd,
But I mean every word.

I love you more than words can say,
More than the sunlight loves the day.
More than my father—and yes it’s true.
But more than anything: I love you.

Sweet baby babes, it’s been three weeks.
And still I cannot quit your cheeks.
Your apple cheeks are so soft and sweet.
They totally cannot be beat.

And if you’re sad or feeling blue,
I’ll always make some room for you.
Just rest your little head on me,
And baby all will gravy be.

Cause you’re four-eleven, cute and small,
And I’m six-three and standing tall.
Baby mine, I’m built like trees.
You rise up barely to my knees.

So I shall buy you some small place,
A little home with warmth and grace.
Or maybe some downtown apartment
Where all of our love can rest apace. 

And yes beneath the sheets we’ll creep—
OMG, baby, did I just say sheets?
But sheets, my darling, cannot lose.
They totally and fully rule.

I must have took some love-drunk pill,
And baby I am floating still.
Or maybe swallowed the whole jar.
I know that sounds a little bizarre.

But that’s just how I feel for you,

My Babush baby tried and true.
Don’t yawn, my pet, don’t drift away.
I need your sweetness every day.

I’m crazy for you. Wild it’s true.
And usually I’m mellow, 
But not around you. No no no.
Around you all my feelings do grow.

They rise and swell like ocean tides,
Like moonlit waves at eventide.
They crash and roar upon the shore
And then come rolling back for more.

The angels watch from high above.
The gods too, baby. That is love.
They watch you, me, and all mankind—
The short, the tall, the sweet, and the kind.

And sweetheart yes, you are my heart.
At least the biggest, finest part.
Though room remains there for my son.
And baby I have only one.

He means the whole wide world to me.
Just like you do, my honey bee.

Baby baby, my Litzy Litz honey.

I have some money. And you do too.
But our love runs deeper than money, honey,
And baby I know that much is true.

And maybe that sounds a little funny.
Laugh out loud. Let’s laugh awhile.
Cause baby we are the cool-kid crowd,
And darling we do it all with style.

And I shall buy you a shining ring.
Yes dear, the ring is the thing.
No wait—make that two instead.
One for your hand and one for my head.

Platinum maybe, or jeweled with light,
Like the crown you wear day and night.
Princess mine, yes the ring’s the best.
And baby your beauty outshines the rest.

And I shall worship down at your feet.
And honestly baby, ain’t that neat?
Then I shall stand and carry you slow
Back to our room where the soft lights glow.

And I just said bed—yes that’s true.
That is just what I said to you.
With giant pillows that puff and billow,
Soft as clouds or a little marshmallow.

Or maybe baby it’s a waterbed.
Wouldn’t that rule? Enough said.
We’ll sleep together like little mice,
Warm and tiny and cozy and nice.

And ain’t they cute? Well shoot, they are.
Baby you shine like a lucky star.
Our first date now is drawing near.
OMG baby, it’s almost here.

And we have spent long hours on phones,
So neither of us feels all alone.
Cause baby you always carry me,
As I carry you through stormy seas.

And I don’t know much, but this I know:
My love for you will just grow and grow. 
I’m fifty-two and you are fifty,
And honestly baby, ain’t that nifty?

I don’t want younger girls no more,
Even the pearl-like beauties ashore.
Cause baby I only and fully want you.
Forever and ever. Tried and true.

Bank it sweetheart. Trust what I say.
Everything’s gonna be fine someday.
Pause dude. Baby just chill.
Don’t go and spill your ink at will.

Don’t splash your words all over the page.
That is the path to readerly rage.
Keep it moving. Keep it light.
Keep the rhythm warm and bright.

Cause baby this poem must soon end,
But I shall always your heartstrings mend.
If sadness finds you, I’ll stay nearby.
I’ll hold your hand and I’ll never lie.

For I will never break with you.
My heart stays faithful, tried and true.
As faithful as wind over oceans blue,
And sweet as melons in morning dew.

And I shall take you to heaven and back,

With love and warmth and midnight snacks.
And heaven, darling, must surely be
Somewhere with you right next to me.

So come here close now, baby mine.
Your little hand fits well in mine.
And I shall kiss your mouth so sweet,
And places farther down beneath—

OMG baby, I just said south.
Quick, back again now to your mouth.
Your lips, your nose, your hips, your eyes,
The stars reflected in midnight skies.

And all of you shall belong with me,
As mine belongs completely to thee.
For sure, sweetheart. Forever true.
Litzy Litz baby—I love you.

Dedication:

For my darling Litz. I am so happy that you are in my life baby. I promise to love you forever and a day. I love you.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Of Montreal’s The Past is a Grotesque Animal

Note: A reflective piece on an Of Montreal track and a cluster of other listening moments where music stopped being background and became something closer to intervention. Starting in a cramped, overheated apartment in Furano, Hokkaido, on New Year’s Day 2006, the essay moves through a snowbound walk soundtracked by Kevin Barnes’ The Past is a Grotesque Animal, then branches outward to two other formative listening experiences—Bob Dylan on a half-awake AM radio morning, and Father John Misty in mid-career exhaustion on a city commute. It is less about music as taste than music as rupture: the way certain songs bypass interpretation and reorganize the inner self in real time, leaving the listener briefly unarmoured, and then altered.

Furano, New Year’s Day, 2006.

Outside, Hokkaido is doing what it does in winter when it stops pretending to be habitable: the air is an exposed blade, the snow hard-packed and granular underfoot, everything outside reduced to distance, glare, and breath. Inside Ken and Eri’s small apartment it is the opposite problem—heat pushed to excess, a sealed, overcompensating warmth that turns the room into a kind of shared pressure chamber. We are all in it together: Ken, serving in the Japanese army and posted up here in Furano; Eri, quietly and expertly holding the domestic center; their son Shinya, one year younger than our son Hugh; and the four of us effectively folded into one cramped sleeping arrangement that collapses night into proximity. It is kind, it is hospitable, it is also inescapably too much. The bed feels like it belongs to no one and everyone at once.

I remember wanting, with a clarity that felt almost physical, to go home. Not anywhere abstract—Kyoto specifically. My own bed. My own thermostat. The ability to set the heater somewhere between restraint and comfort rather than Arctic evacuation or sauna collapse. Kyoto’s winter is mild enough to forgive you for being human. Furano’s winter is not.

It is late afternoon on New Year’s Day. The holiday has that particular suspended quality: nothing is open, nothing is moving, and even time seems to have adopted local weather conditions. I have just discovered I have lost my wallet—ID, credit cards, the small administrative skeleton of a life—and I am trying not to let it tip everything further off balance. Eri will later find it, of course, lodged under the couch cushions, and post it back as if this is just another minor adjustment to the day’s equilibrium. At the time, though, it feels like the world tightening a little further around me.

So I go for a walk.

It is not a decision so much as a pressure release. I put on headphones, step out into the cold, and immediately the winter reasserts itself with total authority. No negotiation. Just air, snow, and the sound of my shoes biting into frozen ground. I am wearing sneakers instead of boots, which already feels like a small error in judgment that will have consequences.

And then I press play.

The Past is a Grotesque Animal arrives like a system taking over the system. Of Montreal, Kevin Barnes—whatever name you want to use for the person or force behind it—unfolding a twelve-minute architecture of confession, excess, fragmentation, and emotional overexposure that does not so much accompany the walk as overwrite it.

I do not listen once.

I walk for an hour in circles, or near-circles, or something that becomes circular by repetition. The song loops again and again—four times, maybe more—and each return feels less like repetition and more like deepening. The cold sharpens, the snow crunches, my breathing becomes part of the rhythm. At some point I am no longer fully tracking direction. I am just in motion inside the sound.

And I am crying.

Not the polite kind of emotional leakage you can disguise as weather or fatigue, but something closer to surrender. Barnes is doing something too exposed, too unguarded, too structurally unstable to defend against. It is not just lyrics—it is tone, duration, refusal of containment. The line lands like a fracture: you know things could be different / but they’re not.

That is the moment. Not because it is the most complex line, but because it is the simplest possible articulation of something I am already carrying without knowing it.

Ken and Eri are not the problem. In-laws are not the problem. Furano is not the problem. The problem is the accumulation: ambition just starting to harden into structure (new full-time role at Rits Uji after years of part-time teaching), the sense of trajectory toward IB, the pressure of becoming legible professionally, and underneath it all the quieter, more persistent anxiety about language, about my son’s future English, about whether proximity is enough when communication is not yet guaranteed.

Hugh is three. He doesn’t yet speak English in any sustained way. He will, later—Kyoto International School, gradual unfolding—but at this moment it feels like a future I am trying to pre-pay emotionally, as if worry could accelerate outcome.

And so the walk becomes something else entirely: a cold, repetitive loop through snow and sound, a private weather system synchronized to a song that refuses to stay at a safe emotional distance. I am half-lost in it, half-anchored by it. At some point I stop thinking in sentences.

When I finally turn back, the house is still there, still too warm, still intact. The ordinary world resumes its shape as if nothing has happened. Dinner will happen, conversation will happen, the night will pass.

But something has already been displaced.

That walk, that loop, that song—those remain as a fixed point. Not resolution, not transformation exactly. More like an encounter with a register of feeling I did not previously have language for, but which now exists and cannot be removed.

Barnes did not explain anything.

He just got through.

Kevin Barnes, the lead singer of Of Montreal, is one of those contemporary indie figures who refuses the clean categories people like to file musicians into. What’s known, in fairly plain terms, is that Barnes has moved over time into an openly fluid understanding of gender and sexuality—identifying in recent years as non-binary and queer, using multiple pronouns, and explicitly framing earlier work (including the Georgie Fruit persona) as something they now see as a problematic, overextended act of identification and performance. That matters because it retroactively clarifies what was already visible in the live persona you’re describing: drag-inflected glamour, exaggerated femininity/masculinity, theatrical self-invention as method rather than costume.

The deeper pattern is that Barnes’ sexuality and identity have never been “announced” in a single stable form so much as continuously staged—worked through performance, breakdown, and reinvention. The turbulence people sometimes read as “issues” (depression, relationship collapse, manic productivity, alter-egos like Georgie Fruit) sits less in the register of scandal than in the register of aesthetic method: self as unstable material. Albums like Hissing Fauna… are basically internal monologues set on fire, where romantic relationships, identity, and chemical imbalance are all entangled rather than separated into neat clinical categories. 

Barnes sits in a lineage of glam and art-pop performers (Bowie is the obvious shadow) where gender play is not commentary on identity but the medium through which identity is continuously rewritten. The result is that the work feels emotionally confessional even when the persona is highly stylised: the sincerity and the artifice are not opposites; they are fused, sometimes uncomfortably so.

In short: Barns does not have a fixed sexuality, and lives t a life in which sexuality, gender, and performance are permanently entangled, and where his “issues” are inseparable from the creative engine itself.

Grotesque Animal arrives less like a track than like a prolonged exposure to someone thinking out loud with no filter, no editing instinct, and no interest in letting the listener rest. The Past is a Grotesque Animal begins with a kind of conceptual detonation: the past is no longer memory or narrative continuity, but something bodily and misbegotten, an organism that looks back at you with the capacity to reveal not just error, but total epistemic miscalibration. The emotional register is already unusual here—this is not nostalgia, but retrospective humiliation at the fact of having ever thought you were right about anything.

From there the song folds into a second movement that is almost aggressively self-conscious: desire framed through embarrassment, attraction filtered through cultural overreach, intimacy mediated by theory. The encounter with a “cute girl” is not allowed to remain simple; it immediately drags in philosophical reference points, as if feeling itself requires justification through external intellectual scaffolding. What should be direct becomes over-determined, and the over-determination is precisely the point: the narrator cannot experience attraction without simultaneously watching himself experience it. Even love becomes something like a performance being observed in real time.

Then comes the pivot where the track sharpens into something more brutal. The language shifts from reflection to collapse—academic failure, emotional disintegration, the recognition of being “gone” while simultaneously narrating that disappearance. The crucial gesture here is not despair but authorship: the insistence that even breakdown is self-produced. That phrase—“authoring disaster”—is doing a great deal of work. It removes the possibility of passive suffering and replaces it with something more modern and more punishing: agency inside collapse. One is not simply breaking; one is composing the form of one’s breaking as it happens.

By the time the song reaches its midsection, it has abandoned restraint entirely. What had been psychological becomes infrastructural. The fantasy of tearing things apart—houses, bodies, structures of containment—is not really about violence in a literal sense, but about the release from moderation. It is a desire for total unbinding, for a condition in which limits no longer apply and intensity can proceed without correction. It feels adolescent in energy but philosophically adult in implication: if order is already failing, why not accelerate the collapse and inhabit it consciously? “Let’s tear our fucking bodies apart.” Indeed.

What prevents the song from becoming mere excess is its final register shift into intimacy as circuitry rather than refuge. The closing idea is not reconciliation but connection as transmission—human relation imagined as something like hidden wiring beneath visible separation. Two people are not joined by resolution or understanding, but by something involuntary and continuous, an electrical sympathy that persists even when emotional coherence has dissolved. Love here is not stabilising; it is conductive. It carries instability rather than resolving it.

That is what makes the piece so unusual over its length. It does not progress toward clarity or resolution; it deepens a single proposition through repetition and escalation: that consciousness is unstable, self-authored, and perpetually aware of its own failure to stabilise. And yet, paradoxically, that awareness itself becomes the form of continuity. The song does not resolve the grotesque past—it learns to live inside its ongoing presence.

I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them, and the distinction has mostly to do with form rather than intent. A lot of the catalogue is deliberately baroque—dense production, shifting textures, long runtimes that feel less like songs than elaborately staged environments you’re expected to inhabit rather than enter. There’s a kind of aesthetic overgrowth to it: too many surfaces, too many internal modulations, too much happening at once for easy emotional access. It’s not background music, and it doesn’t really want to be. The cost of that ambition, for me, is that it can be hard to get inside the songs in a way that feels immediate or bodily. You end up listening at them more than through them.

Which is why The Past is a Grotesque Animal feels so different. It breaks the pattern entirely. It is still maximal, still structurally excessive, still willing to stretch time, but it has a strange internal clarity that most of the other material doesn’t. There’s no sense of ornamental distraction or sonic clutter for its own sake. Instead, everything feels metabolised into a single forward-moving emotional logic. It doesn’t feel like it’s demonstrating complexity; it feels like it’s trapped inside it.

And crucially, it has no filler energy whatsoever. Even at length, it maintains pressure. It doesn’t meander—it accumulates. Each section feels necessary to the psychological arc it is tracing, even when the content is volatile or self-cancelling. That’s the paradox: it is expansive but not indulgent, long but not diffuse. It behaves less like a composition and more like a sustained state of consciousness that refuses to close.

That’s why it stands apart. In a catalogue where density sometimes becomes opacity, this one remains piercingly legible. It is maximal, but it is also focused. It doesn’t just add material—it tightens around an emotional core until it becomes unavoidable.

The final movement of this piece is really about how certain songs don’t just soundtrack life, they puncture it and then rearrange the internal furniture. I don’t have many of these, but I have a few, and they tend to arrive at moments when I am not exactly looking for them.

One is Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand,” heard half-awake at around 6:30 in the morning on AM radio, sometime in my late teens. I hadn’t slept properly in years—there was a long adolescent stretch where nights just bled into mornings—and the room was that grey-blue pre-dawn wash where nothing feels fully solid. I remember lying there with the radio still on from the night before, drifting through news bulletins, late-night voices, static, and then this song arriving like a kind of moral weather system. It doesn’t announce itself so much as settle in. Something in it made the world feel both unbearable and forgiven at the same time. I stayed in bed longer than I intended, not because I was tired, but because getting up felt like leaving something important unfinished.

Another is much later, in 2017, walking down the steps toward a Starbucks after work, head full of obligations, deadlines, the general low-grade administrative pressure of being a functioning adult in motion. On comes Father John Misty’s “Leaving LA” from Pure Comedy, and I just stop. Not dramatically—no cinematic pause—but enough that I find myself going up and down the steps again, as if I’ve temporarily forgotten what the destination was supposed to be. The song is slow, almost patient with its own despair, and it carries that peculiar tone of someone who has both succeeded and slightly lost the plot in the process. There’s a line of thinking in it about authorship, irony, and being turned into something by other people’s projections—about how the self becomes a kind of public object. And it landed at exactly the wrong/right time, which is to say: it landed perfectly.

And then there is the Of Montreal experience, specifically Kevin Barnes’ “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” I like Of Montreal, but I don’t love them in general. The songs are often too baroque, too long, too densely wired to immediately enter; they resist casual listening in a way that can feel like work. But this one is different. It is not just long, it is internally necessary. It moves through regret, desire, self-destruction, erotic confusion, intellectual posturing, collapse, and a kind of exhausted self-awareness that never quite resolves. The refrain—“things could be different, but they’re not”—is almost banal on paper, but in the context of the song it becomes something closer to a philosophical statement about adulthood itself. There is no exit ramp offered. Only repetition, escalation, and admission.

What ties these three moments together is not genre or mood, but exposure. Each of them removes a layer of insulation. Dylan makes meaning feel too large to comfortably contain. Misty makes authorship feel slightly embarrassing, slightly external, as if the self has already been narrated elsewhere. Barnes, in the Of Montreal track, does something more aggressive: he refuses to simplify anything at all, and in doing so forces the listener into a kind of emotional honesty that is hard to sustain.

These are not “favourite songs” in any simple sense. They are more like points of contact where life briefly becomes too legible, and then continues anyway.

Dedication:

For Kevin. I know you’ve been through it baby. I’ve been through it too and I can hear it dude. 100. You rock baby.

Note: If you ilke this piece you may also like the pieces about music below.

In Defense of Conor Oberst
In Defense of Ryan Adams
In Defense of Mark Kozelek
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Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships IV: “Soft in the Center”

Note: This piece will take up “Soft in the Center,” track 2 on Heaven is Whenever (Vagrant Records, 2010) by The Hold Steady. This one will be a little different for a couple of reasons. First, Heaven is Whenever was the first Hold Steady record after the departure of their keyboard player Franz Nicolay, and Nicolay was (and is, because he rejoined in 2016) a huge part of the Hold Steady sound. Therefore, I will look briefly at the personal dynamics of the band, insofar as they’ve been made public. Second, I will take up song order, something I intend to return to in future pieces. Third—and maybe most importantly—I am using this piece to set an intention. A serious one.

Epigraph:

You can’t tell people what they want to hear

If you also want to tell the truth

Craig Finn

I want to be a music writer.

I have always wanted to play music, and I remain fascinated with the role of the frontman or frontwoman. There are so many great ones—Finn, Mick Jagger, Bret Michaels (I really just want to perform “Shelter Me”), Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and many others. But I am not, at this moment, a songwriter or a singer, and I am still working on understanding songwriting from the inside.

So my goal is simpler and, in some ways, harder: to be the best music writer that I can be.

I don’t think I can be as good as Chuck Klosterman, who is amazing, and I am not really a reviewer. I don’t write reviews; I write analysis. I’m less interested in telling you whether something is good than in understanding what it is doing—how it works, what it reveals, and what it becomes when placed next to a life.

So I’m not competitive with Klosterman, and I’m not competitive with reviewers generally. But I am competitive with myself, and in a narrower sense, I am competitive with myself to be the best Craig Finn analyst around. Finn has, in my opinion, leveled up his songwriting several times across his career, and I want to level up alongside him as a writer.

That’s the goal. Let’s take up “Soft in the Center.”

The Hold Steady’s on and off again keyboardist Franz Nicolay joined The Hold Steady in 2005, after the release of 2004’s Almost Killed Me. Almost Killed Me may be my personal favorite Hold Steady record, but it is also true that the band’s sound took a major step forward with Nicolay. Some of their most iconic songs depend on his presence as much as on Finn’s voice.

There isn’t a great deal of publicly available detail about Nicolay’s departure in 2010. Compared to famously volatile bands—Jane’s Addiction, The Rolling Stones, Galaxie 500—this one seems almost restrained. Finn described it as amicable. Nicolay described it as a “closed book.” Both statements feel composed, even careful, which in itself tells you something about the people involved.

What matters for our purposes is the effect. Without Nicolay, the band’s sound on Heaven is Whenever is leaner. The keys are still there, but diminished, less central, less cinematic. There is more space, and that space exposes Finn a bit more.

For a long time, I misheard this record. I thought the highlights were the obvious ones—“The Weekenders,” “Sweet Part of the City.” Recent listening corrected that. My favorite, by a ways, is “Soft in the Center,” with “Our Whole Lives” in second place. The latter contains the line, “We’re good guys, but we can’t be good all the time,” which could stand as a thesis for much of Finn’s writing.

The fact that I missed both songs initially is not trivial. It suggests that some of Finn’s best work doesn’t announce itself immediately. It waits.

Which brings us to song order.

“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on the record and one of its most immediate. I tend to favor leading with your strongest statement, and I think there’s a case that it should have opened the album. There is a long tradition of bands doing exactly that—“Janie Jones” by The Clash, “Teenage Riot” by Sonic Youth, “Rocks Off” by The Rolling Stones. These are not just songs; they are openings that define tone and intent.

Finn has acknowledged that “Soft in the Center” has a certain built-in audience response, particularly around its chorus. He can feel when a line is going to land, when a certain type of listener is going to raise a fist. That’s not calculation so much as familiarity—he understands the emotional economy of his audience because he helped build it.

The song itself unfolds as a conversation, and more specifically, as advice. It is an older voice speaking to a younger one. In that sense, it mirrors earlier Hold Steady material like “Killer Parties,” but from the opposite side. In those earlier songs, Finn is inside the chaos, narrating in real time. Here, he stands outside it, looking back, trying—gently, imperfectly—to intervene.

The opening image is stark: a young man leaving a hospital, returning to a city that has not changed. The implication is clear without being over-explained. Something went wrong—an overdose, an accident, a night that tipped too far. And yet the conditions that produced that moment are all still in place. The city remains. The temptations remain. The system resets.

Finn’s great line—“You can’t tell people what they want to hear / if you also want to tell the truth”—lands here as a kind of thesis. It is a statement about songwriting, but also about mentorship, about friendship, about any attempt to guide someone who is not yet ready to be guided. The truth, in Finn’s world, is rarely what anyone wants to hear in the moment.

When he follows it with a direct address—“I’m just trying to tell the truth, kid”—the dynamic becomes explicit. He is the older figure now. Not removed, not sanctimonious, but positioned. He has been through something. He has survived something. And survival, in Finn’s writing, tends to confer not authority exactly, but a certain obligation to speak.

The chorus distills the advice into something almost disarmingly simple: you can’t have everything; you learn to love what you have. Finn himself has noted that he knows lines like this will hit. They scan as universal, almost cliché at first glance. But in context, they are not glib. They are corrective. They push back against a younger worldview built on accumulation—of experiences, of people, of intensity.

This is one of Finn’s recurring moves: to take a sentiment that could sound obvious and place it in a context that makes it necessary.

The second verse introduces the song’s central metaphor: the frozen lake. Finn, being from Minnesota, grounds it in lived experience—“a place with lots of lakes”—but the image does more than local color. It becomes diagnostic.

On the surface, everything looks stable. Solid. Safe. But “sometimes they get soft in the center,” and that center is “a dangerous place.”

This is the song’s title, and its key. The “center” here is not just the literal middle of the lake; it is the middle of the action, the heart of the scene, the dead center of the city, the place where things feel most alive. It is also the place where the structure is weakest. The danger is not at the edges, where you might expect it, but at the point of maximum immersion.

That is a sophisticated inversion, and it maps cleanly onto the nightlife world Finn has chronicled for years from his albums with his first bands Lifter Puller through to today. The parties, the drugs, the endless nights—they are not dangerous because they are marginal. They are dangerous because they are central, because they feel like the point.

Finn frames the young man’s situation with unusual generosity: “you can probably do anything, if you can get yourself right.” This is not moralizing. It is not even particularly prescriptive. It is conditional. The possibility is there, but it depends on an internal realignment that the speaker cannot perform for the listener.

There is also, quietly, autobiography here. Finn writes in the great song “Most People Are DJs” about his own youthful excess—“I was a Twin Cities trash bin/ I’d jam it all into my system”—and the process of pulling back from that edge. What matters is not just that he got himself right, but that he remembers what it was like not to be.

From there, the song largely reiterates its central ideas, but with increasing insistence. The chorus returns. The advice is repeated. And then comes the bridge: “I know what you’re going through / I had to go through that too.”

This is where the song earns its authority. Not in the cleverness of its lines, or even in the sharpness of its metaphors, but in its identification. Finn is not speaking from above. He is speaking from experience. The distance between the older voice and the younger listener is real, but it is not absolute.

And yet—and this is crucial—that identification does not guarantee transmission. The younger figure may still ignore the advice. He may return to the city, to the center, to the unsafe ice. Finn knows this. The song does not resolve that tension. It simply articulates it.

What makes “Soft in the Center” so effective is its clarity. Finn is not being coy about the theme. He is saying, in essence: the action is real, the lights are bright, and the pull is powerful. You will want to stay in it as long as you can. But there are costs. There are limits. There is time.

You age. You win and lose people. You push your system until it pushes back. You end up in rooms—hospitals, apartments, empty bars—where the energy has drained out and something quieter, and less negotiable, remains.

“Take your time,” the song seems to say, but also: think it through.

That balance—between permission and warning, between empathy and clarity—is where Finn’s later songwriting lives. It is a long way from the breathless immediacy of Lifter Puller, but it is not a rejection of it. It is a reframing. The same world, seen from a different distance.

“Soft in the Center” is, to my ear, the best song on Heaven is Whenever and one of the strongest in Finn’s catalog. It is direct without being simplistic, reflective without losing momentum, generous without losing edge.

Simply marvelous.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also deal with the songs of Craig Finn.

On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”
On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”
Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
Posted on by Matt Thomas

On Lou Reed and John Cale’s Album Songs for Drella (aka The Trouble With Classicists)

Note: This post takes up Songs for Drella (1990), Lou Reed and John Cale’s uneasy reunion album/biographical song-cycle about Andy Warhol, moving track by track through Warhol’s trajectory from Pittsburgh outsider to Factory-era icon to post-shooting isolation and mythic afterlife. Along the way it reads the record not just as tribute or elegy, but as a sustained meditation on work, style, and the thin boundary between populist gesture and aesthetic theory—especially in the pointed figure of “classicists” versus Warhol’s downtown anti-orthodoxy. What emerges is less a linear album review than a set of reflections on art, authorship, and cultural literacy, with Warhol as both subject and pretext for thinking about what it means to make anything count as art in the first place.

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In 1990, Lou Reed and John Cale, formerly of the Velvet Underground, latterly famously not getting along, reunited to make Songs for Drella, a tribute/ musical biography of their first patron, Andy Warhol. Drella is a 15 song cycle which takes the listener through Andy’s life and career, from his early days in Pittsburgh, through success in New York, getting shot, latter-day isolation and and loneliness, and ending with an epitaph. The songs fit loosely together in chronological order. Here is the basic scheme: “Smalltown” sees Andy unhappy in Pittsburgh and dreaming of the big city; “Open House” describes the early days of the factory, when all and sundry stopped by and provided Andy with inspiration; “Style it Takes” gives an overview of some of Andy’s famous works and his working method; “Work” explains the considerable work ethic that underlay Warhol’s success; “Trouble with Classicists,” in what is presumably Andy’s voice, provides a series of opinions about “classicists”, “impressionists”, and “personalities”; “Starlight” appears to consider Andy’s flirtation with Hollywood, or Hollywood’s flirtation with him; “Faces and Names” kicks off the second section of the record and finds Andy in despair, something like a midlife crisis; “Images” details Andy’s philosophy of art and hits back at the critics of his method; “Slip Away,” “It Wasn’t Me,” and “I Believe” represent the nadir of the record in which Andy is warned about the people he associates with, confronts a junkie, and is shot by Valerie Solanis; “Nobody But You” sees Andy bereft of companionship hanging out and paying the price of dinner of a nobody; “A Dream” synthesizes all which has come before and puts Andy’s life into fuller perspective; “Forever Changed” sees Andy’s past slipping away; and “Hello It’s Me” represents Reed’s epitaph and apology to Warhol.

Some of the songs are better than others; specifically, I get comparatively little out of “Starlight,” “It Wasn’t Me” and “Forever Changed,” but every song has its place in the story of Warhol’s life and his influence on Reed and Cale, his circle, New York city, and the art world in general. This post will take up the first five songs as a bridge into a wider discussion of the meaning of “classicism” today. There may or may not be a part two to this post.

“Smalltown” is about leaving Pittsburgh, and introduces us to the fact that Andy was gay:

When you’re growing up in a small town
Bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty
People look at you funny
When you’re in a small town

New York is more to his liking, and provides a context for his art to flourish:

Where did Picasso come from
There’s no Michelangelo coming from Pittsburgh

I hate being odd in a small town
If they stare let them stare in New York City

The theme of small town boy (girl) made good in the big city is classic and well worn, of course, but Andy thrives in NYC, and soon “The Factory” is open to all comers (“Open House”):

Come over to 81st street I’m in the apartment above the bar
You know you can’t miss it, it’s across from the subway
and the tacky store with the Mylar scarves

Andy wants people around him, and this is one of the major themes of the record; his ability to work is dependent on company and inspiration from associates, peers, and even hangers-on:

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
The way to make friends Andy is invite them up for tea

It’s a Czechoslovakian custom my mother passed on to me
Give people little presents so they remember me

Whereas “Smalltown” is loud and bracing, the music on “Open House” is soft, elegant, gentle even. But even in his halcyon early days in NYC Andy cannot entirely escape the demands of the market or of other people’s ideas of what he should be doing:

I think I got a job today they want me to draw shoes
The ones I drew were old and used
They told me — draw something new
Open house, open house 

You scared yourself with music, I scared myself with paint
I drew five-hundred fifty different shoes today
It almost made me faint
Open house, open house

Andy’s career takes off, and he clearly has something that people want–he has “The Style It Takes.”

You’ve got connections and I’ve got the art
You like attention and I like your looks
and I have the style it takes and you know the people it takes

I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art
It’s the same one you can buy at any supermarket
‘Cause I’ve got the style it takes

Here, Reed and Cale delve into the perennial question of the definition of art–what’s good, what’s bad, and how do we know the difference? The answer which “Style It Takes” seems to offer is: the status of something as “art” is dependent upon someone with “style” telling so. This observation is at once banal (we know art is art because it hangs in a museum and because of the reverent hush of the patrons), and somehow inspiring (a kid from Pittsburgh, “bad skin, bad eyes – gay and fatty,” can take the New York art world by storm simply be possessing some quicksilver attribute called “style,” something so powerful that a simple box of soap pads becomes accepted as art less on its own merit and more on the strength of its association with Warhol, who by 1964 was rapidly ascending to the status of an icon). This song also sees the first appearance on the record of a little group called The Velvet Underground, who Andy “shows movies on.”

“I’ve got a Brillo box and I say it’s art”–is this a populist claim or an elitist one? Is it classical? Certainly not classically classical, but is there not a way in which Warhol’s “pop art”–which is often read as representing the “emptiness” of modern popular culture, is perfectly sincere and actually uninflected with irony? Another major theme of the record is Andy’s work ethic–he was a working artist on whose sweat the whole Factory scene was dependent. Andy’s work ethic, according to Reed and Cale, even had a religious aspect. “Work” starts with Andy in prayer, and despite the neat twist on the phrase “Protestant ethic” here, we are left with the strong feeling that Andy was no self-ironizing dilettante, and that his blue-collar background stuck with him throughout his life:

Andy was a Catholic,
the ethic ran through his bones
He lived alone with his mother,
collecting gossip and toys
Every Sunday when he went to church
He’d kneel in his pew and he’d say,
“It’s work,
all that matters is work.”

He was a lot of things,
what I remember most
He’d say, “I’ve got to bring home the bacon,
someone’s got to bring home the roast.”
He’d get to the factory early
If you asked him he’d told you straight out
It’s work 

In “Work,” Andy stresses quantity over quality; just as he had painted 550 different shoes in “Open House,” here he advises Reed to write like there is no tomorrow:

No matter what I did it never seemed enough
He said I was lazy, I said I was young
He said, “How many songs did you write?”
I’d written zero, I’d lied and said, “Ten.”
“You won’t be young forever
You should have written fifteen”
It’s work

But despite his working artist approach, Andy is not content to merely record the surface of what he sees. Neither, however, is he given to too much soul-searching or self-analysis about why he is who he is, or why he does what he does. “The Trouble with Classicists” is the central song on the record, the song where Reed and Cale get closest to defining Warhol’s attitude toward art. It is also here from which I was moved to take on the issue of classicism in our times:

The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree
That’s all he sees, he paints a tree
The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky
He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky

The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log
He doesn’t know who he is,
standing, staring, at this log {…}
That’s the trouble with impressionists 

If neither classicism nor impressionism, than who or what is Warhol drawn to? The answer is graffiti artists, of all things:

I like the druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains
I like their lack of training, their primitive technique
I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school
I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool
That’s the trouble with classicists

Let’s dig a little deeper. Cale, who sings “Classicists,” is himself famously a “classically trained” musician, who has drunk heavily of modernism and dissonance without surrendering what I still see as a fundamentally classical musical and aesthetic sensibility. Moreover, writing a song called “The Trouble with Classicists” in this day and age is in itself a classical act. This I think is a key point; whereas once upon a time a Romantic poet could have defined himself or herself in violent opposition to Classicism and made it stick, today, and perhaps even in Warhol’s day, the ability to criticize classicism as a form or style is evidence of a degree of learning and cultural literacy which can only be described as classical, and, yes, a little elitist.

Is this right? It sounds right, at least, and I would add the following: a) the vagueness with which I am approaching the question of a modern definition for classicism in these paragraphs is symptomatic of the generally pitiable state of true learning on that part of what Edward Said calls “the general intellectual”; b) Said’s general intellectual today tends also to be as Dean Williams has said a “profound modernist”–which is a nice way of saying someone who knows, and cares, very little about Western culture’s classical roots, very little about the Bible, very little about the great religion (at least in any fine grained way), probably very little about Shakespeare for that matter; c) today’s general intellectual knows very little about music compared with his 18th or 19th century counterpart. This is a point which Said makes in his chapter on Glenn Gould in On Late Style: “Today’s literary or general intellectual has little practical knowledge of music as an art, has hardly any experience playing an instrument or studying solfege or theory, and except for buying records or collecting a few names like Karajan and Callas, does not as a matter of course have a sustained literacy–whether that concerns being able to relate performance, interpretation, and style to one another, or recognizing the difference between harmonic and rhythmical characteristics in Mozart, Berg, and Messiaen–in the actual practice of music” (115). Any of my general intellectual readership care to take this argument on? If so, please produce 100 words on solfege without reference to Wikipedia before wading in.

My point, which is, I fear, on the verge of getting lost, is less that Warhol or for that matter Reed and Cale are in any specific way “classical,” but that because what Said calls the lack of “sustained literacy” in music on the part of the general intellectual is not confined to music, but extends to art, classical and great literature (how many of us who name drop Aristotle have actually spent any time reading him? how many of us who attempt to evince first-hand knowledge of Marx have actually broached Capital?), and philosophy. That is to say that the general intellectual today is apt not only to be a profound modernist, but also to be a profound generalist, who knows a miniscule amount about a huge number of things, a little bit about a few things, and knows almost nothing is any truly extensive or impressive detail. In this context, not only is “The Trouble with Classicists” deeply classical, not only is Classical Sympathies, by very virtue of its being and intent, classical, but any attempt to engage in a serious way with issues of aesthetic definition marks one out as both a classicist, and at least a minor elitist. Certainly Said, for all his “oppositional” stances and leftist politics, was both–but the question of how leftism and classicism can co-exist is best left for a latter date; it is time to stop work on this post and risk being called a fool.

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On the Song Prince Hal’s Dirge: Confidence, Reformation, and the Politics of Self-Making

Note: This short essay takes Loudon Wainwright III’s song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” as a lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s Prince Hal in Henry IV, focusing on the idea of self-fashioning across time. It reads Hal’s apparent debauchery and later reform not simply as moral transformation, but as a theory of confidence—either consciously staged, in Shakespeare’s version, or more instinctively internalized in Wainwright’s. Moving between text and song, the piece explores how both versions hinge on the same underlying question: what kind of inner structure allows a self to pass through disorder, delay, and social misreading without collapsing, and to reconstitute itself as effective action when the moment arrives.

Epigraph:

Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Loudon Wainwright

This piece takes as its source the song “Prince Hal’s Dirge” by Loudon Wainwright III, itself based on Shakespeare’s character Prince Hal from Henry IV. The figure of Hal is one of Shakespeare’s most carefully constructed political selves: a young man who deliberately inhabits disorder in order to make his eventual reformation into kingship appear all the more legitimate, even necessary.

In Henry IV, Hal openly announces this strategy to Falstaff and the other tavern companions:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.

And again:

So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better that my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal’s logic is explicit: he will cultivate disorder as a kind of aesthetic and political foil. His apparent immersion in low company is not failure but strategy. Falstaff and the tavern world become, in effect, instruments in the staging of legitimacy.

Paraphrased, Hal is saying: I will live among you for a time, but only in order to abandon you later in a way that maximizes my transformation into kingship. He is a political animal who understands reputation as something staged across time.

Loudon Wainwright III’s “Prince Hal’s Dirge” takes up this same figure, but shifts the emphasis in a revealing way. Wainwright—still best known to many for novelty songs like “Dead Skunk,” though his broader body of work is far more substantial—reimagines Hal less as calculating strategist and more as self-contained performer of confidence within disorder.

The song opens in full immersion in debauchery:

Give me a capon
And some roguish companion,
A wench and a bottle of sack.
Take me to the ale house
Take me to the whorehouse.
If I vomit, keep me off of my back.

Here Hal is not yet strategy, but appetite. The political mask is absent; what remains is the world of consumption, drink, sex, and collapse.

But Wainwright then pivots:

My father, he thinks I’m a good for nothing
that I won’t amount to much.
But he’s not aware of my secret weapon.
I can count on myself in the clutch.

This is the key transformation. Shakespeare’s Hal is self-consciously future-oriented: he plans his reformation as spectacle. Wainwright’s Hal, by contrast, carries an interiorized assurance that he will simply “come through.” The emphasis shifts from calculation to instinctive resilience.

This continues in the song’s martial register:

Show me a breach,
I’ll once more unto it.
I’ll be ready for action any day.
I’ll straighten up, and fly most righteous.
In a fracas, I’ll be right in the fray.
I can drink you under twenty-five tables,
Fight and be a ladies man.
But all this will change,
When I’m good and ready,
To become the king of this land.

The phrase “any day” is doing important work here. It carries the rhetoric of readiness without commitment to timing. It suggests immediacy while quietly deferring it indefinitely. The transformation is always available, never enacted.

What emerges is a different psychological structure from Shakespeare’s original. Shakespeare gives us a political actor who consciously engineers perception over time. Wainwright gives us a man who believes in a durable inner core of competence—someone who can be disordered without being undone.

And yet both versions converge on the same underlying mechanism: confidence as political force. Whether staged (Shakespeare) or internalized (Wainwright), Hal’s power rests on the belief that identity can survive its own contradictions and ultimately reorganize them into legitimacy.

Singing “Prince Hal’s Dirge” before work, I find myself struck less by the irony of Hal’s transformation than by the necessity of something like an unbreakable interior core—something sealed enough to survive fluctuation, failure, and delay, but still flexible enough to return to action when required.

That, ultimately, is what both Shakespeare and Wainwright are circling: not morality, not reform, but the strange political psychology of self-belief under time pressure.

Dedication:

For my father, the biggest Shakespeare lover I know.

Note: If you liked this piece, you may also like the pieces below which also take up various literary works.

On Staying in Business Hotels (Featuring a Little 9-ball)
On Raymond Carver’s “Fires”
Posted on by

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships III: Jessamine (Craig Finn’s Miniature Masterpiece)

Epigraph:

Jessamine must have had some dreams/ but she never really said what they were.

Craig Finn

Note: This is the third entry in my little ongoing series on Craig Finn / The Hold Steady songs that take up nightlife, messy adult relationships, and the long shadows cast by fleeting encounters. Part I and Part II are available. I’ve also written at length about what I consider Finn’s two greatest songs: A Bathtub in a Kitchen and It’s Never Been a Fair Fight.

Jessamine is track 8 off of A Legacy of Rentals, Finn’s 2022 solo record distributed on his own label, Positive Jam Records. It clocks in at a tight 3 minutes and 25 seconds, and once again I am simply overawed by Finn’s concision and his ability to tell a whole story in just a few words. It is my opinion, and I do not say this lightly, that Finn is the greatest short story writer to have ever lived. 

Jessamine tells the story of a three week relationship between the narrator, who we will continue to call C. for convenience, and a goth girl with a need for speed. A Legacy of Rentals contains at least three excellent songs, the crime caper “The Amarillo Kid,” the gorgeous “The Year We Fell Behind,” and Jessamine. I would love to write about The Year We Fell Behind as well, however Jessamine falls neatly into our conceit of nightlife and adult relationships, although this one seems to depict more of a young person’s relationship. Close enough. 

Jessamine is folky and lilting, of a piece with Finn’s later work which tends toward folk and country as opposed to Lifter Puller’s indie fever dreams and The Hold Steady’s soaring rock anthems. The Finn song that it most closely resembles is “Esther,” from a 2018 EP by The Hold Steady which also depicts an intense and short-lived relationship. “The party ended suddenly, suddenly it’s over/ That left me and Esther all alone and getting older/ All alone and getting older smoking in the street/ Now everything is Esther and it’s been that way all week.”

Jessamine opens thusly:

I met Jessamine in Cherry Hill

Her dress all done in daffodils

The sticker on her skateboard said, “Speed kills”

And yeah, it probably did just what it said

Cherry Hill is in New Jersey, where the song is set. Jessamine is probably a younger woman, and a skater. The first verse foreshadows her ultimate fate. Incidentally, the first time I visited New Jersey was junior year of college with my Asian Art History class. It was also on this trip that I first visited New York City, the most intoxicating place on earth which I have written about relatively extensively. I wrote about my Art professor in my piece on my senior year at Hamilton College, in relation to a girl I had a total crush on, called L. L. was not exactly goth, but she might have been goth-adjacent. And she was totally intense. More on goths in a minute.

Verse II adds a little more context.

I only knew her for like three weeks straight

And the whole time we were wide awake

You know “Trenton Makes, the World Takes?”

She had it spray-painted over her bed

It is my experience that short-term relationships can be, probably are, the most intense and intoxicating type of relationships in a sense. The depth that comes with a true crush, while of a completely different valance from a long-term relationship, is, I believe, without parallel. But then again, I’m an action junkie, as is Finn. I wrote about the power of a crush in my Bad Moves piece where I confessed to a serious crush on their lead singer, Katie Park. I actually sent the piece to the band via Instagram, and they responded saying “Thanks for the write-up.” I don’t know, but I like to believe Katie read, or at least saw, my piece! Unfortunately, Bad Moves are disbanding and are, I believe, on their farewell tour.

The wording “three weeks straight” implies that C. and Jessamine were, temporarily, inseparable, sleep deprived, and deep into each other. Trenton is, of course, also in New Jersey, and though I hadn’t heard of the exact phrase quoted until I listened to the song, it is apparently well known locally and appears in neon on a bridge.

Verses III and IV introduce Jessamine’s death obsession, and to me anyway suggest that she is what I would call a kind of a goth.

We used to hang around her room

Getting off on all the gloom and the doom

Watching cavemen in the cartoons

Playing xylophones made out of bones

She was sexy, but still death-obsessed

She said the bloodshed makes such a mess

But you really don’t even have to market it

Yeah, it pretty much sells itself

Now I am not really into a lot of bones and blood personally, but I do like me some goth girls. In fact, in the course of my life I have sort of quasi-dated a few, and for whatever reason they are just my speed. I find goth girls sexy, like Jessamine, caring, and deeply intriguing. And mysterious, of course. I have a weakness for crazy women; I cannot lie. And already I can totally see Jessamine’s appeal.

Jessamine has a number of semi-chourses, and the first one goes like this: 

I should’ve asked her before she departed

How did all these wars get started?

Why do rival crews show up to the same parties

If they hate each other so much?

It’s like they’re secretly in love

Again, we foresee Jessamine’s demise up front. Why would Jessamine have insight into the origins of global conflicts? I’m not quite sure, however the image of rival gangs being secretly in love is oddly compelling. However, it is with the next verse and chorus that the song really gets going.

Verse V and Chorus II go like this:

She said, “Suspicion isn’t wisdom

And the drones look just like doves”

And there was something laying siege to her kingdom

But she never really said what it was

While the incense turned to ashes

And the sunrise was unsure

Jessamine musta had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

Here we learn that our goth girl heroine has something going on that is unarticulated, or perhaps inarticulable. “Jessamine musta had some dreams/ But she never really said what they were” is such a wonderful and moving line. We all have dreams, I suppose; some come to fruition and some don’t. But Finn is in no way judging Jessamine’s relative inability to describe her dreams; instead this aspect of her character only adds to her obliqueness, her mystery.

The next verse and chorus show that Jessamine in the end, and probably in the beginning, had the upper hand in the relationship.

We kinda ended how we began

With Jessamine meeting a man

And liking that man just a little bit more

Than the boy she had before

I hadn’t even seen her since

I guess this new guy was some kind of prince

I guess his castle was a front for some fence

And then the whole damn city got warm

And they were trying to ride out that storm

Again, Finn is a total master of precision and compression. C. is immature, Jessamine is, to some extent, on the make, her new boyfriend is crime-adjacent (so many of Finn’s songs feature characters on the margins of the legal world), and the whole damn city mirrors Jessamine’s flightiness. The crush is over; C. is dumped and he never sees her again. That’s a weird and kind of almost frightening part of short-lived relationships–while their depths are as intoxicating as anything in life, people will just move on and the moment exists only in memory, burned into the fabric of time, but still fleeting.

The next verse points toward C. getting over Jessamine, and alludes to the idea that what may seem for a time to be a storm will pass; a crush, with all its power, is also somewhat illusory.

‘Cause the rain is inconsistent

And the thunder is insincere

‘Cause it makes a big commotion

But eventually it clears

The next verse and chorus puts a pin in Jessamine’s story, and Finn employs his classic penchant for alliteration along the way. Maybe to get away from the scene, or perhaps for some other reason, C. moves out west, loses his shirt, metaphorically, and literally perhaps, and gets word of Jessamine’s demise.

I went out to San Francisco

And some sailor stole my shirt

I was sitting on the passenger side in a taxi

The first time that I heard

That she was probably speeding

And no one else was hurt

Jessamine must’ve had some dreams

But she never really said what they were

Yeah, she never really said what they were

I love the line here “and no one else was hurt.” It’s hard to fully explain why, but it’s oddly moving that Jessamine, on her way out, with all her attraction to blood and bones, didn’t take anyone with her. Finn doesn’t even really register what C.’s reaction is to Jessamine’s death is, he simply repeats the lines about dreams such that she dies as she lived, unknown to herself and unknowable to others.

Overall, Jessamine might seem like kind of a minor song. It’s short, and maybe doesn’t have the deep metaphorical richness as a song like A Bathtub in the Kitchen. Nonetheless, I love it. My sense is that a writer has to write for years and years before they can get to a song like Jessamine. Finn is a few years older than me, and has accumulated the wisdom and compassion to make a song like this look easy. It is not.

I wish her to say a brief word about AI, which may seem unrelated. The other night I met up with a few friends and some friends of friends were there as well. One of them, a slightly older gentleman who used to work in tech, started talking about how much he loved AI music, especially some kind of mash-up of two well-known bands. I appreciated that fact that he liked this “music,” but I have to confess that I could not have cared less. The idea of AI music, especially music with lyrics, interests me not at all. And this is, essentially, because I like people better than machines, but also because I don’t think AI, at least at this point, can come close to writing a song like Jessamine. I won’t get super political here, however the idea that AI can replace, or even duplicate a Jessamine, or Return of the Grievous Angel by Gram Parsons, or Come in from the Cold by Joni Mitchell, for example, just seems absurd to me. As implied above, Finn had to live 50 years, listen to tens of thousands of songs, and write hundreds to get to Jessamine. At 3 minutes and 25 seconds it is a mini-masterpiece.

Dedication:

For goth girls everywhere.

Note: If you enjoyed this piece you might also enjoy the pieces below, which also cover the singer-songwriter Craig Finn.

Craig Finn on Nightlife and Adult Relationships I: Most People are DJs
On Subcultures and Scenes in Craig Finn’s “It’s Never Been a Fair Fight”
On Craig Finn’s “A Bathtub in the Kitchen”
Posted on by Matt Thomas

WAYFARER: A PLAY

Note: This piece is a five-act play based loosely on a week I spent in Oxford in 2018. Unlike my previous narrative essays on the same material, (here, here, and here), this is written as a staged work, with dialogue, silence, and structure doing the heavy lifting. At its core, the play explores the tension between experience and narration—what happens when a person tries to turn a living moment into a story too quickly, and what is gained (and lost) in that process. While grounded in real events, it is not strictly autobiographical; it is a shaped and curated version of those experiences. As with all my work, the hope is that it resonates beyond its immediate context. Thank you for reading.

A Five-Act Play

EPIGRAPH

I can’t believe all the good things that you do for me
Sat back in a chair
Like a princess from a faraway place
Nobody’s nice
When you’re older your heart turns to ice

Mark Kozelek — Have You Forgotten

ACT I — THE WAYFARER

Scene 1 — Registration Desk (Threshold)

Lights: institutional white. Gradual warm shift beneath it, as if memory is already leaking into the space.

Sound: distant conference murmur. A faint, unresolved piano note.

A desk. A GATEKEEPER. A lanyard laid out like an object of passage.

MATT enters. Slightly lost. He has clearly been walking longer than intended.

GATEKEEPER
Name?

MATT hesitates. Reaches for something that is not yet ready.

MATT
Here. I think.

He presents credentials.

Stamp sound. Too loud for the space.

The badge is handed back.

CHORUS (from off, soft, not fully placed in space)
Arrival.
Conference.
Inn.
Story begins again.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside, not heard by others)
I thought I came to learn.

The badge feels heavier than it should.

Lights soften.

Scene 2 — Inn Common Room

Warm, slightly unreal hospitality lighting.

Tables. Cups. A space that feels both public and private but refuses to decide which.

ELODIE is present as if she has always been there.

MATT notices her immediately.

NARRATOR-MATT
Voltage.

ELODIE
Tea?

MATT
Yes. Thank you.

Beat. Nothing rushed.

CHORUS (slightly brighter, almost encouraging)
House lady.
Innkeeper.
Muse—

(a correction, quieter)
No. Person.

ELODIE does not acknowledge the Chorus.

Scene 3 — “Sing for Your Supper”

Sound: faint guitar motif. The room subtly shifts into performance space without fully becoming one.

CHORUS subtly rearranges space like memory editing.

MATT sings quietly:

MATT (singing fragment — The Clientele, “The Violet Hour”)
so that summer came and went
and I became cold
yeah I became cold

ELODIE listens. No visible transformation.

NARRATOR-MATT
Hospitality is not destiny.

The room remains unchanged.

Blackout.

ACT II — THE HOT ZONE

Scene 1 — The Casino

Green felt lighting. Rotating overhead spot.

CROUPIER replaces Gatekeeper.

CROUPIER
Place your bet.

MATT
Meaning.

CHORUS
Luck.
Chance.
Myth begins when odds are misread.

MATT places chip.

Sound: chip hits felt—final, sharp.

Scene 2 — Triptych (Three Trips)

Lighting pulses three times. Distinct beats.

MATT (low, repeating)
Three trips.
No more trips.

CHORUS fractures into three figures: GENIE / GHOST / MESSENGER.

NARRATOR-MATT
Inspiration gone.

GENIE (brief, playful)
First.

GHOST (slow, distant)
Memory.

MESSENGER (clear, neutral)
Transmission.

All fade.

Scene 3 — Jungle Confrontation

Green light. Reduced set. No realism.

MATT
Her.
Leave everything.
Frontman.
Practice.

ELODIE
No.

MATT
What is this?

ELODIE
Not your exorcism.

CHORUS
Brink.

Blackout.

ACT III — NAMING THE PATTERN

Scene 1 — Needy Boys

Two chairs. Neutral white light.

ELODIE
Don’t narrate me.

MATT pauses. This lands fully.

NARRATOR-MATT
I was writing her.

Silence.

Scene 2 — Chapel

Stillness. Breath-level sound only.

CHORUS (barely present)
Meaning.
Destiny.
Story.

NARRATOR-MATT
Room, not revelation.

Silence holds.

Scene 3 — Pattern Recognition

Lighting: subtle timeline shifts—memory flickers, not time travel.

NARRATOR-MATT
Senior year.
Again.

ELODIE
Your pattern is yours.

MATT
I see it.

CHORUS
First choice.

Blackout.

ACT IV — RELEASE

Scene 1 — The Offer

Dusk light.

MATT
Part-time.
Scout.
Not jungle.

ELODIE
Boundaries are kindness.

Scene 2 — The Pivot

Warm domestic light replaces earlier symbolic tones.

MATT
Family.
Music.
Life.

CHORUS
Myth.
Escape.
Hero.

MATT
No.

Silence holds. No response from Chorus.

Scene 3 — Chorus Dissolves

Lighting: references dim one by one.

CHORUS removes masks.

NARRATOR-MATT
The story stayed.
The spell lifted.

Blackout.

ACT V — OXFORD CODE

Scene 1 — Gesture

Morning Oxford grey. Minimal space.

ELODIE
Take care.

MATT
You too.

Beat.

No escalation. No closure ritual.

Scene 2 — Benediction (Chapel Revisited)

Same chapel. Quieter now.

Sound: Arvo Pärt piano. Sparse. Non-declarative.

NARRATOR-MATT
Gratitude.

Silence. Breath.

MATT listens without narrating.

Scene 3 — Train

Sound: distant platform announcement. Train readiness.

Gatekeeper becomes CONDUCTOR.

CONDUCTOR
All aboard.

CHORUS
Run back.
Declare.
Confess.

MATT
No.

MATT boards train.

NARRATOR-MATT
The jungle is real.
The girl is real.
The story remains.

Beat.

NARRATOR-MATT (softer)
You think you’ve finished it. Then it comes back different.

NARRATOR-MATT (aside)
She knew more than I could say.

Train departs.

Lights fade with motion, not blackout.

FIN

Posted on by Matt Thomas

On The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats

Note: This piece takes up the 2008 record The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats as a tightly structured emotional sequence rather than a loose collection of autobiographical songs, tracing how John Darnielle moves from childhood survival through adolescent endurance, imagined justice, outward identification with others’ suffering, and finally a grounded, unsettling encounter with memory and partial reconciliation.

Epigraph:

I leaned my head in close to the little record player on the floor

So this is what the volume knob’s for.

Released in 2005, The Sunset Tree is widely regarded as the defining record by The Mountain Goats and the most directly autobiographical work by John Darnielle. The album centers on his childhood and adolescence under an abusive stepfather, and the long, uneven emotional project of trying—never quite succeeding—to understand or forgive that past. It has become the band’s best-known record, both for its clarity and its force, with songs like This Year and “No Children” forming its core identity in the wider culture.

Dance Music

“Dance Music” opens in a small, specific place—Johnson Avenue in San Luis Obispo—and immediately establishes the strange clarity of childhood memory: precise details without full understanding. A television hums with the Watergate hearings, a child senses that something is wrong but cannot name it, and a record player becomes an unlikely refuge. From that point, the song moves with quiet precision between moments of violence, escape, and interior unraveling, compressing years of experience into just over two minutes.

What strikes me is how firmly he anchors the song in space and time: Johnson Avenue, San Luis Obispo, five or six years old, Watergate hearings on TV. It’s precise enough to feel real, but not over-described. This isn’t abstraction—it’s memory with edges.

The child doesn’t understand what’s happening, but senses it. That “spidy sense” of something wrong is exactly right. The record player becomes a kind of accidental sanctuary. And then the line about the volume knob—discovering control for the first time—still hits hard. It’s a moment of agency inside chaos.

Cut forward, and nothing has resolved. The same house, the same structure, but now adolescence, relationships, internal damage. The “secret sickness” feels like a slow internalisation of everything that could not be processed earlier. The movement language—twisting roads, cul-de-sacs—suggests trying to find exits that don’t exist, or lead back into themselves.

And then the final image: police, dance music still playing. No resolution, just continuation under pressure. The refusal to close is part of the point.

This Year

If “Dance Music” shows how survival begins, “This Year” shows how it is sustained. Still rooted in the same autobiographical terrain of John Darnielle’s adolescence, the song shifts from memory to immediacy. It is one of the most recognizable songs by The Mountain Goats, defined by urgency, repetition, and forward motion.

This song is about survival and grit. The details—an older car, struggling engine, movement through space—create a physical sense of instability. You can feel the effort of motion.

The repetition is not optimism—it’s insistence. Saying something until it becomes structurally real. “Manifest” is the right word. This is survival being constructed in real time.

The narrative sections imply violence without naming it. Everything is loaded, but never fully articulated. That restraint is what makes it powerful.

And the ending—moving toward a distant, almost mythic place like Jerusalem—carries the sense of escape not as fantasy, but as direction.

Up the Wolves

Placed mid-record, “Up the Wolves” becomes the pivot between endurance and imagination. Where This Year insists on survival and Song for Dennis Brown expands suffering outward, this song introduces the possibility of emotional reordering—of imagining forgiveness, escape, and restructured power.

The key idea here is that damage is not escapable—it follows you. But alongside that is the introduction of imagined relief. The more aggressive imagery is not literal—it’s emotional escalation, the mind testing what justice might feel like if it were unconstrained.

The Roman myth framing matters: origin stories built from violence and absence. It lifts the personal into something archetypal. This is the first time the album seriously considers not just survival, but transformation of structure.

Song for Dennis Brown

At first glance, this appears to be a departure—a tribute song placed late in a deeply personal record. But it functions instead as expansion. The focus shifts from autobiography to shared human conditions of mortality, damage, and endurance.

Dennis Brown died in 1999, widely associated with Rastafari culture and a life shaped by both musical legacy and personal struggle.

This is not just about Dennis Brown—it is identification. The song places him and the speaker inside the same pattern of fragility and consequence.

The world is not paused by death. It continues. That’s the structural point. The imagery of decay alongside innocence creates dissonance—life continuing in spite of damage.

The violent reworking of natural imagery reinforces that nothing remains untouched. This is the album’s outward turn. Not introspection, but scale.

Pale Green Things

As the final track, this returns to specificity. The stepfather is no longer a looming figure of power but a weakened, aging man after a heart attack, still performing small routines at the racetrack. The focus is observational rather than symbolic.

We are grounded in physical detail: racetrack, stopwatch, Racing Form. A man reduced but still engaged with structure The “pale green things” recur as quiet markers of life continuing—small growth, persistence, indifference.

The shift is subtle but crucial: the speaker is now present with him in this space. Not outside it. Memory returns not to violence but to observation. That is the emotional pivot. What remains is not resolution, but recognition. The mind returns to this moment rather than others.

Closing reflection

Across these five songs, The Sunset Tree traces a coherent emotional progression: from childhood survival in “Dance Music,” to adolescent insistence in This Year, to imagined restructuring in Up the Wolves, to outward identification in Song for Dennis Brown, and finally to direct, grounded confrontation in Pale Green Things.

What makes the record so enduring is not that it resolves the question of abuse or forgiveness, but that it refuses to simplify it. Survival is shown as repetition, will, imagination, projection, and finally memory itself. Forgiveness appears not as an endpoint, but as something unstable, partial, and deeply contested.

It is also worth noting—without collapsing interpretation into autobiography—that these questions are not abstract. Many listeners carry their own histories of harm and difficulty in forgiving those histories fully. I would include myself in that broader human category. What makes this record remarkable is not that it answers forgiveness, but that it shows how seriously it must be attempted, even when it remains unresolved.

That is why The Sunset Tree endures: it treats survival and forgiveness not as conclusions, but as ongoing acts of attention.