Spoiler

- Act V takes place during the 1930’s



- During Act V Hunter and Ms. Leading are back together. Hunter is leading a double life with her in secret.



- The Dime remains closed throughout Act V . There is still prostitution in the City, but it isn’t confined to a particular building/place. EDIT: The Dime reopens during Act V.



- Hunter and the Fianc é e are married in Act V (she is now The Wife), but he's also with Ms. Leading on the side. The Wife knows but looks the other way. The Wife also knows that Hunter is not the half-brother.



- Hunter spends his home life with the Fiancee/Wife being his half-brother, and then spends his leisure time with Ms Leading being his real self, and there's an intimacy in that.



- In Act V, Hunter is a fractured mess of a person, married to the Wife with a son as the mayor in public, but seeing Ms Leading and addicted to opium in his private life.



- The Moon / Awake is about the boy going to an opium den and having an out of body experience and being able to basically see himself and talk to himself.



- The apparition refers to his former self, the person he feels he has wronged.



- The entirety of "The Moon" is Hunter being determined to do right by his younger self, which is the apparition that he sees. He is in an opium den, addicted, and goes there to have this manifestation of himself. Now that he has this assumed identity, he wants to be connected to something that he actually is, which is the apparition.



- “The Moon” is mostly sort of a message between Hunter and his younger self. The idea is that we become completely different people over time, so the person Hunter used to be no longer exists. The song is a message to his older self, almost trying to make sure he is doing right by what that person would want.



- The HSHHAS callback in The Most Cursed of Hands is a parallel to when Hunter was mad hearing that story, like he is hearing the Priest tell this one.



- The parable of the devil and the gambler is something I came up with when I was looking for a way for the Priest to twist the knife while giving, on the surface, an anti gambling sermon to the congregation. But it's being delivered in such a way that, to the Boy, it is clearly about Act IV. He tried to beat the devil, but really he ended up setting the devil free.



- The parable in “ Most Cursed Hands” has existed in this world for a long time (similar to the drinking song in “Go Get Your Gun”).



- "Who Am I?" is a moment of Hunter wondering if it is worth it to keep playing along, and he wonders whether he is the gambler or the devil from the parable.



- Casey is trying to do a short film w/ Gloria director about Most Cursed Hands of Hands.



- Melpomene is about Ms. Leading.



- Mr. Usher does not take sides - he conspires against both TP/P AND Hunter



- Casey shot down the theory of Mr Usher being a representative/avatar of the Devil. I’m paraphrasing, but he said “Isn’t he that much more evil if he’s just a man?”



- Casey said Mr. Usher in a way represents himself, and how he is the one who brings about the end of these characters.



- There are definite elements of Mr. Usher's character that I like to think are pure evil, and not so much about wanting to cause chaos, as much as deriving glee from the pain of others, but he is not actually supposed to represent the devil per se.



- The Devil (from the Most Cursed of Hands) is not Mr Usher, but Hunter comes to view Mr Usher as something worse than the devil "because there's something horrifying in seeing Mr Usher do this awful deplorable things and knowing that he's just a regular human being."



- Mr. Usher was a character that I had in mind for a long time, and I needed to write a character song to introduce him. I felt like it needed to be simultaneously charismatic and poised, but also sinister, and obvious that we're talking about a terrible person. It's like an old crooner song like Mack the Knife, with the sinister undertones of Baby It's Cold Outside (in which a guy is about to rape some woman). Mr. Usher is sort of whimsical (with obvious Andrews Sisters harmony in the middle). It's intentionally a 1930's-40's big band swing throwback. But it does serve the same purpose as King of Swords as the "sore thumb" of the album, very standout.



- The comparison I've been using [for Mr. Usher, TP/P and Hunter] is the Emperor, Darth Vader, and Luke, in terms of the power triangle. By the end of Star Wars, you get the idea that the Emperor didn't really care if Vader won or if Luke won, he just wanted a sort of power from pitting people against each other. It's also a sort of "controlled demolition," creating an opportunity for Mr. Usher to move in and take the power and control. It's not just that he revels in causing chaos.



- Mr. Usher is something like an ex-politician. Someone who had success in politics and then went on to be a successful businessman who is involved with organized crime. Everyone is too afraid of him to be fully involved in what he does, but also too afraid to oppose him. I pictured him as aging, maybe in their 70's almost, who still wears Victorian era clothes in the 1930's. He's sort of a relic, but very capable of terror. But he has no interest in doing it himself. He loves the act of turning people against each other. He might be able to achieve his goals in a more savory way, but he likes the less savory process.



- Mr. Usher has an existing relationship with TP/P, but it isn't really important to the past. He has not been in any of the Acts before.



- “The Haves Have Naught” is between Mr. Usher and Hunter.



- Having Gavin sing as Mr Usher in The Haves Have Naught was just a stylistic choice, because Casey wanted it to be obvious that it was two people singing and he didn’t want to do two different voices.



- “The charlatan” referred to at the end of The Haves Have Naught is Mr. Usher.



- In “The Haves Have Naught” Mr. Usher is trying to convince him the people aren't worth saving.



- Light is with the Fiancée’s/Wife’s son.



- Light is about the infant son and Fiancée/Wife leaving back to the Lake and the River.



- Hunter sends them away because he doesn’t feel fit to be a father.



- Gloria is also an opium hallucination. “Don’t tell anyone what you saw here” - basically his subconscious imploring him to keep his visions a secret, since nobody would believe what he experiences while he’s high.



- Casey was very involved with the casting of the Gloria video, with the exception of Ms Leading. He felt it would have been too weird. The actor who played Hunter was a method actor who listened to nothing but TDH in the weeks leading up to the video shoot and insisted that Casey and everyone call him Hunter. The fact that the same actor plays TP/P and the General is just a coincidence.



- In The Flame, Mr. Usher convinces TP/P that he’s losing control of Hunter and Mr. Usher convinces TP/P to kill Ms. Leading. The motivation that he suggests is "if you take away this one remaining thing from this person's life that ties them to their old self, you will leave behind a malleable shell with nothing left to cling to." He tried to manipulate the Boy first in "The Haves Have Naught," but he doesn't succeed. He knows if he can instigate open hostility, it will just be met with retaliation and more retaliation.



- At the beginning of the Flame, TP/P is starting to see that he is starting to have less control over Hunter. Hunter is becoming less and less apt to play along, which you can sort of see through the first half of the record.



- In “The Flame (Is Gone)”, Mr. Usher is talking to The Pimp/Priest, trying to convince him to kill Ms. Leading but make it look like an accident, so that the Boy will be broken and empty, making him an easy person to manipulate. Mr Usher knows this won’t work but simply wants to bring an end to it all.



- The line “You won’t return” in “The Flame” is Mr. Usher speaking under his breath.



- The significance to the Melpomene reprise as the end of The Flame is that Melpomene is Ms. Leading's song, and now she's dead, so her song is flipped into a minor key.



- There's a lot in the line “Lungs of a lark”. Larks are fragile, and since the line is sung by Hunter, he is also representing himself as a very fragile person trying to express himself. Also, a Lark can imitate other birds, and the Boy is mimicking another person too.



- Hunter burns the Church/Dime.



- Presumably before he burns down the buildings, Hunter sends away his wife and son, to the lake and the river, since his remaining in their lives will only cause them harm.



- Ms. Leading doesn’t die in the fire, but the Pimp and the Priest directly murders her in cold blood her.



- The Flame is Mr Usher convincing TPP to murder Ms. Leading. Casey has not thought through the details of how Ms. Leading is murdered, because he felt that would be a bit too dark to think about. Hunter burns down the Church/Dime with Ms. Leading’s body inside. Casey hasn’t thought about whether there is anybody inside either building when they burn, but probably not.



- “The Flame” is a play on words referring to Ms. Leading, but there’s also more to it than that.



- Hunter finds Ms. Leading dead in the church, so he burns it down with her inside like a funeral pyre.



- After TP/P kills Ms. Leading, her body is cremated in the fire.



- The Dime is still closed during Act V and the church has not become a brothel, but they're close enough together that they both burn.



- TP/P riles up the mob and leads them to Hunter’s house. He basically says “let me go in and try to reason with him,” and goes in, where Hunter kills him (again didn’t specify method of death). He stands over TP/P’s body in his house and contemplates what is left for him - nothing. If he dies, this pain will stop, it will all be over, at least things won’t suck anymore. OR, and this is the turning point in A Beginning, what if there is some sort of afterlife and everyone you’ve loved is there and it’s great? He commits suicide.



- Hunter thinks that dying by his own hand is better than what would happen if the mob gets a hold of him. Everyone knows who he is, Ms. Leading is dead, TP/P is dead, his Wife and Son are safe. He can die on own terms or surrender. He weighs the options of what happens when you die.



- There’s nothing in death, there’s everything in death. Either are better than continuing on.



- The line “I’m a Killer” is not as literal as there being a point in the song where Hunter kills TP/P. That line is Hunter looking at everything he's done to that point already. But then there is this sort of physical determined move that he makes at the end, which is him resolving to kill TP/P.



- Casey had originally written a different ending/second half to A Beginning (starting at that hopeful turning point) but scrapped it and re-recorded what became the final version.



- Both Hunter and TP/P are dead by the end of Act V.



- There's something very special about the last few minutes of "A Beginning," with that sound and then the reprise, but I can't tell you why, that's going to be a big part of Act VI.



- Casey has obviously envisioned the Acts as a movie – I asked what was happening in Cascade and he walked us through the beginning of Act V as if it were a movie. He said the Awake part of The Moon/Awake is where the opening title would come in, and then Cascade is Hunter’s inner monologue as he walks through the City on his way to the Church. He also said that if it were a movie, the end of The Flame would be TPP standing in Ms Leading’s doorway in silhouette, coming in to kill her – then fade to black.