fahrendengesellen-deactivated20 asked: Hi! Tallahassee has been one of my favorite albums for a long time, but I JUST started thinking about point-of-view in it. I realized that I was hearing the whole album as being sung by Mr. Alpha and also that, whenever I listen to a song in general, I assume without thinking about it that the narrator has the same gender as the singer, unless explicitly stated otherwise. Are there songs on Tallahassee that are not Mr. Alpha's, or other songs you've written that are definitely narrated by women?

when I started getting serious about writing songs, in college, I always tried to keep gender pronouns out it so that there’d be a permanent ambiguity to it. people hear a masculine voice and tend to identify the singer as male, but it is more fun from a writing/performing standpoint (for me, I should say) to keep things loose. also, that way anybody can sing your song without having to go switching pronouns around.

on occasion I’ve introduced/deployed some gender-specific word or phrase kind of for the shock of it: “one of us/I’m not saying who/has got rocks in her head” in “Orange Ball of Hate,” “…and tell everyone you were a good wife” in “No Children.” But for the most part the idea with Tallahassee is that either partner could be singing the songs most of the time. Because they are truly partners, one flesh, of one accord, two spirits sailing aboard a doomed ship toward the same bleak end; and what God has joined together let not man put asunder, Mark 10:9, however cf also Florida statute 61.052, to wit, No judgment of dissolution of marriage shall be granted unless one of the following facts appears, which shall be pleaded generally: (a) The marriage is irretrievably broken.