Resistance Lullaby: The last song written for the album. We started pre-production in the end of fall, then took a break. Our A & R guy, Michael Caplan, told me to write at least one new song while I was away. I came back with Animadversion and Resistance Lullaby. The cellist Marika Hughes did a fantastic job on this song, using the cello both as a swelling pad and to make the eerie somewhat percussive noises.

This song is about the abyss and uncertainty many people feel upon graduating college. A lot of people I know spent the first year or two out of school just dealing with this rising dread- what do I do now? Aren't I supposed to already have succeeded? And the rest. The big issue to me about liberal arts educations is that they don't explain what they are useful for. I mean, in most cases, what you've learned is really not that important to what you do next. An English, French, literature, history, psychology, or anthropology major is equally qualified to go to law school, work for a non-profit, work for a bank, hitch-hike, or become an actor. So what do you actually learn?

In my opinion, what you actually learn is the process of learning. A major is, after all, basically a way of thinking. You start out exploring classes in a whole variety of subjects, trying to figure out which one, and which way of thinking, you like. Then, you decide upon a major. At this point, you switch from trying different ways of thinking and begin to explore one method in depth. You learn how one way of thinking organizes information, and the kind of conclusions it draws. But maybe what you've learned is less important than having learned how to take any given method of analysis and succeed with it.

What this does mean, though, is that you don't really know how to do anything but you are completely ready to learn anything. So, the whole pressure to feel like you should now know what you want to do is ridiculous. You should now go out and start trying different things to find which ones might or might not work for you. And finding what you don't want is probably more useful than finding what you only somewhat want.

Schools make you think that you come out at the end of something- you have finished, you know something, you have a degree, now show us what you can do!
The reality is that you have come out at the beginning- you don't really know anything, and you have, at best, a slight idea of what you want to do (with some lucky exceptions). So rather than thinking you have something to prove, go out and figure out what's even worth your time to prove in the first place. Class dismissed.