A lot of ghastly things and crystal-ball symbolism run through it, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot of abuse-survivor stuff, like "The Autopsy Garland", which is about Judy Garland. And then "Birth of Serpents", "Outer Scorpion Squadron", and "Never Quite Free", which are all more or less about me. It was a weird five a.m. revelation. Like, if The Sunset Tree was about living in the middle of abuse, this is more of a surviving record.

Pitchfork: When you wrote about the album on your website, you referenced 70s occult horror movies and their feeling of dread.

JD: The signal piece for me is Burnt Offerings, which is a movie that's almost exclusively about mood. In it, there's all this build-up to a chaotic last 10 minutes. There's this feeling of dread, which is a different thing from horror or terror; dread is just that awful sense that something terrible is going to happen. For those of us who are into horror, dread is a nice, sort of powerful feeling. It's not that you're afraid of something; you're riding that feeling. And that's what I think surviving stuff is about-- learning to ride stuff like waves instead of letting it crush you.

Burnt Offerings trailer:

Pitchfork: Did you have any other signal pieces that helped guide the album?

JD: There's the George Romero movie Martin (1977). It's about a guy who's a vampire-- or maybe he's not a vampire. Maybe he's just crazy. Yeah, he drinks blood. But maybe he doesn't actually need blood. Maybe he's just someone with uncertain motivations. That's the beauty of Martin.

And then I read a book about the development of neanderthals as a category, and that was really moving and weird to me. Do you know how people used to think of neanderthal man?

Pitchfork: No, I don't.

JD: Neanderthal is this branch of human development that doesn't seem to fit into the story. We have some fairly linear progressions, and then you have this little hook off to the side. For years, the theory ran that neanderthal man just went extinct. Either they didn't breed with cro-magnons, or cro-magnons wiped them out. We don't know what happened to them. This is no longer the operating theory, but it was the one that inspired me.

There is a William Golding book, The Inheritors, which operated on the theory that the cro-magnons hunted and killed the neanderthal. To me, that's a profound notion-- one race of man hunting the other for sport. It's Planet of the Apes weirdness. I read these stories about the development of the species, and there's interesting scientific stuff about people faking evidence and everything. It's got this weird occult vibe of trying to construct a secret false history.

Another inspiration was Goya's "Black Paintings". This is going to sounds really bourgeois, but my therapist used to teach art and I was talking to her about Goya, who did these gruesome paintings on the walls of his house. There's this amazing one of Saturn eating his children. They look like visions of a crazy person, but he really did studies for them. It's more like willing yourself to get to that state. And that's what this record is about.

I had this signal moment when I went to Portland at the end of touring The Life of the World to Come and I did what I always do, which is walk around where I used to live and look at things. I got my hair cut by this guy who lived in Portland when I lived in Portland, and I started asking him about people we used to know. He told me that somebody I knew was still working at the same place he'd worked, so I walked down there. But it turned out my hair dude's information wasn't current, and my guy had been hit by a car just a year before. It was weird. I had all these expectations about saying hello to my old friend who I haven't seen in 25 years. And, instead, he's dead. So I went to the hotel and slept. I woke up at 2 a.m. and wrote "Birth of Serpents", which is this marriage of images and the personal stuff underneath them. It's one of the most personal things I've ever written.__

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