¤ milky moon ¤

It was actually a song that I covered years ago, when I was touring. I think the first time I performed this song was at an orchestral show at Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’ve always loved that song, and specifically the Karen Dalton version. The harp version has always been really exciting to me.

As I was writing this record, one thing that kept coming up formally or stylistically was recontextualizing quotes—fragments of a thing—either newspaper articles or quotes from novels or quotes from poetry. Some of them are not so much quotes but descriptions of paintings or works of art. The governing principle behind these quotes is this recontextualization. A collaging thing happens, even within one line or two quotes, [which] might be mashed together in a way that creates a new meaning.

Not only does “Same Old Man” narratively connect to the songs on this record—the city and leaving the city and those sorts of things—but it also takes on a slightly different meaning in terms of the sequencing. The sequencing of the record is important to me, and so the song comes after each song, and the song that’s before it slightly alters the meaning. In a way, it was this larger scale version of the same idea—of making a bit of a collage out of quotations.