Hi there. I'm gonna talk for a second about a song I wrote called "I'm Gonna Die Down Here". I wrote "I'm Gonna Die Down Here" while I was thinking about a few things; the first one- that most any listener could tell just by checking out the first verse-- is Dylan's "The Basement Tapes". I won't get into details of my deep love of everything Dylan, but I will say my initial goal with this tune was to write a song that embodied everything I love about that era of his work; the looseness, the absurdism, the sarcasm, the underlying sense of bitterness. There's a tip of the cap with my references to "the easy chair" and the chord structure, so I start by saying, thank you Bob. I will continue to steal everything from you. Let me know if you want co-writing credit on anything.

More personally speaking; around the time I was working on this song, I was feeling the weight of my failing music career more heavily than usual. I had become relatively convinced that because my father had been a laborer, and his father a laborer, and so on, that I was fighting against natural evolution and that was why things weren't working out for me at that particular moment (I got over that; I'm onto new theories). But being a stubborn person, I knew I'd never hang it up, so I felt a bit like I was volunteering for my own death. And that was the genesis behind the "I'm Gonna Die Down Here" idea.

The rest came to me as a conversation that I wished I'd had with a few people I knew in New York; one of those fantasies you have of telling someone off that you never got to tell off. It felt good. It's definitely my crankiest song, but I had a lot of fun with it. It's a little bit political, but not in a way that necessarily feels hackneyed or even intentionally (though I suppose that's up to you to decide). But I really was feeling that way; "there are haves and there are have-nots and that's ok with me-- but don't get us two confused." That's sorta the fulcrum of the song.

I read somewhere once that in order to write about something you're feeling bad about, you have to feel good about feeling bad. It's a tricky idea, but that's what I was going for here. Something that captured the humor of being at the end of your rope. And that's what I was thinking about.