Omaha

"It's about how circular life is, how it turns people over the way the seasons turn over. Somehow life just bulldozes people."

Mr. Jones

"I love this song because there's so many levels to it. On one level, it's a simple guy song -- but it also has to do with all the things you dream about as a young musician, and how silly and sad and helpless it is to think that everyone's going to love you if you're famous. What do you think is going to be satisfying to get these dreams fulfilled? I can't tell you why I want some of the things I want, but I want...I want...I want..."

Perfect Blue Buildings

"The verses are about how horrifyingly gray and mundane and pointless life in general can be. Nothing catastrophic. Little horrors. Envy of other people. Deep need that is unsatisfied. Boredom. And so the chorus is about how suductive coma-visions are: these dreams of placidity, colors, shapes that are so clean. But the peace is a trap to the person in the song; he doesn't want to fall prey to the visions."

Anna Begins

"It's about denial -- how far you'll go to deny that something's really happening because it's too complicated, too terrifying, too difficult. It's about me and Anna: The relationship was supposed to be light -- we met on vacation -- but we got further into it and it became harder and harder."

Time & Time Again

"A weird song, a wasteland song. It's about the spaciousness of loneliness, equating solitariness with the hugeness of the country. It's about large geographic locations and the protagonist's wish to be displaced in them."

Rain King

"He's a figure of excess. He wants more than he has; he thinks he deserves more than he's got. Joyously and pathetically, he pours all over everyone like a big open wound. In one sense, he's great because he's actually living -- but in another, he's a mess, and he's heading for a very dark place."

Sullivan Street

"My last girlfriend, for the first month and a half that we were going out, her mother was living with her, and her mother's very Catholic. We couldn't spend the night together, so I was constantly making these drives in the middle of the night -- very surreal, four in the morning, falling asleep. I really believed in the relationship, but when I was writing this song, the lyricscame out: "Pretty soon I won't come around". It wasn't what I wanted -- I didn't want it to end -- but there it was. It's about the inevitability of leaving."

Ghost Train

"I think memories are like ghosts -- you can see them, but they're not really there. The more you go on in life, the more you have in your train of ghosts. And when you fall in love, you ride that train together -- the more you get into love, the more you have to share your ghosts with the other person while you're reliving them yourself. That's such a horrible prospect for the guy in this song. It doesn't happen, he doesn't do it -- but he remembers, in the choruses, why he though he might."

Raining in Baltimore

"It's a rare song about being 50 miles from nowhere and wanting to be somewhere else with someone that you miss -- but also realizing that you set this situation up for yourself. This is the saddest, bitterest song on the record for me."

A Murder of One

"I can remember being eight years old and having infinite possibilities. But life ends up being so much less that we thought it would be when we were kids, with relationships that are so empty and stupid and brutal. If you don't find a way to break the chain and change in some way, then you wind up, as the rhyme goes: a murder of one, for sorrow."