It’s crazy that we call this time that we live in the information age. Sure, we have a lot of information, but a lot of it is garbage. And staying on top of what’s going on certainly doesn’t make you better off. I’d love to say that this was written from a knowing place of appropriate information-distance, but the truth is, I was once like Phil in the song- “an information-junkie and a cable-news whore.” I was plugged in to what was happening, and I was getting the talking points. I knew what was what. Or, at least, I thought I did.
It took a while for me to realize that all this information was making me stupid. It was making me feel informed, without actually giving me any actionable information that I could live my life by. I’d love to say that writing this song allowed me to turn a corner, but it took many years to realize that information was more like a drug in our day and age. We are addicted to it, and it made me think of the Dostoevsky quote "knowing is not enough, action requires insight, character, and restraint; true intelligence shows not in thought, but in how we behave.” If we’re basing the knowledge of the human race on how we are currently behaving, then we don’t know shit.
When I was younger, I saw this as a partisan problem. Our side possesses the right knowledge, and those people don’t know anything. Once upon a time, I would watch The Daily Show, and there would inevitably be a montage of conservatives all saying the exact same thing, and I found this hilarious. It wasn’t until years later that I would notice the same meme posted by different liberal friends, that we were doing the exact same thing. Some folks call this messaging, but the result is not that we are talking to each other, but that our messaging is responding to their messaging.
Let’s be honest: the truth is dangerous. There are very powerful people in this world who would not be so powerful and so wealthy if we all knew the truth. In the past, the truth would be hidden away where no one could see it, but today the truth hides in plain sight, surrounded by misinformation. Like a needle in a haystack of needles. The top 1% own as much as the bottom 93%, and yet the bottom 93% keep fighting each other. It’s not an accident. It’s by design.
It can also be a real challenge when the information we are getting keeps changing. Coffee might be food for you this week, but it might not be. And if someone is saying it is, is that because they’re making money from the sale of coffee? How is the information that we are getting paid for? The information that gets the most attention tends to be the information that supports the wealthiest, and the political firestorms that we find ourselves enveloped in are nothing more than smoke-screens.
Some of this information-overload serves no purpose at all, except to get our attention, and what gets our attention seems to be division. It has taken me many years to realize the importance of a healthy diet of information. Just like the food you consume, think about the media and information that you absorb into your psyche, and realize that you are the filter. You don’t have to let every piece in. You get to decide what and how much you consume.
This was one of the earliest songs on The Dark Ages that I wrote. I remember playing it with Danny Flanigan and Alex Wright at Clifton’s Pizza shortly after it was written. Danny was always a big champion of the song, and I’m a big fan of Danny, so, of course he had to play on it. The song is pretty simple musically, so you need Danny’s guitar to add a little musical differentiation.
Jordan Berger plays drums on this, and I stumbled upon Jordan by way of Tonya Buckler. He played drums with the Fellow Travelers, though we never played this song. He was the perfect drummer for the folky Fellow Travelers, but it turns out that he’s just a good all-around drummer. I’m pretty sure Glen would have played it differently, but I’ve come to learn as a producer that there is no “perfect part.” There are bad parts, and you won’t hear those on my albums, but if you hear this song live, it’s going to be a little different.
I had tried to put keys on this myself, and nothing seemed to work, so when I played it for Woody, I didn’t really hear anything for him to do, but I hadn’t heard anything for him to do on “Down in the Valley Again,” and I was pleasantly surprised. He wanted to try the accordion, but I didn’t hear what he was talking about until he added it. Now he’s gotta drag that thing to every gig with us. Poor guy.
Tim Halcomb played bass on this, and Tim is very easy to work with. I’ve played with him in various situations for years. He may be the most tasteful bass player I’ve ever worked with. He was one of the first musicians I pulled in to play on this album. I recorded him so many years ago that he forgot that he had played on many of these songs. And I had him playing upright bass at first, because I thought that this album was going to be a folk album- largely because I didn’t have the gear to record drums. That took a while to acquire.
It’s really easy to record your own backing vocals, but you lose depth when you do that. On my last album, The Heights, I did most of the backing vocals, and that worked because the album is really about isolation, but as I started re-recording lots of my work on this album, I made getting backing vocals a priority. Tonya Buckler is always my first call, but she is a busy gal. I managed to get her to sing one of the parts, but it was right before a band rehearsal and she didn’t have time to do the second one. It turns out there was one singer, whose schedule was fairly wide open- my daughter, Penelope. She has turned into a great singer, and I love having her sing on the same song where I say, “I just want a world where I can raise my kids.” She’s one of the reasons I want to live in that world. My son is the other reason, of course.