In the summer of 2013, my father was diagnosed with a disease that began a steady and inevitable decline to his deathbed. A few years later, he called to tell me that he might have six months left. So I drove from Los Angeles to the Appalachian town where I was raised, and spent the fall and early winter watching death happen all around me. To my father, my home, and a region of America crippled with a poisoned economy. Reflecting on a Dying Man isn’t about death as much as it is about my emotional and intellectual experience of those six months and immediately after. Each song is an attempt to mark a chapter in the timeline that cumulatively conveys some indescribable revelation about growth and atrophy. Some of it was dark. Some of it was beautiful. Some of it was neither. Some of it didn’t really feel like anything at all.
And in its entirety, it all still fails to articulate it.
I will write about this for the rest of my life.
And in its entirety, it all still fails to articulate it.
I will write about this for the rest of my life.