You’re not because you have to step away from it before you have any idea what it still needs.

I wrote and recorded Lincoln Signal in the order in which it will play on your iPod.  It was a little like writing a novel.  When I was about halfway done, while tracking a song called “Off Grid on Target” about a guy who stops retrieving the newspapers from his front porch, a question popped into my head: Who, I wondered, will save Dick Drake?  That name, Dick Drake, is the one I had given to this tormented character I was writing about, this guy I was “inhabiting” in the first person in every song.  And here I was realizing, halfway through the story, that he probably wasn’t going to make it out alive.  It just wasn’t in the cards.

Who, then, would rescue him?

I thought about this quite a bit as I worked.  Surely I hadn’t created this character just to kill him off, right?  Who was going to throw the poor guy a lifeline?

Well, it wasn’t going to be me.

It would have to be him.

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