Catapult

Angels of the Silences

'i don't think about the different verses of "angels..." as being about specific different things(e.g. god, girl, self). i think all the verses are about all those things. the point is the faith'

Daylight Fading

I'm Not Sleeping

Goodnight Elisabeth

"One of the interviewers said to me yesterday "Ya, but how bad can it be...you can have any girl you want." OK, but what if the one girl you do want is at home studying for a Ph.D., and she can't come. She can't even come visit because on the weekends she interns at a clinic. What do you do. "Life isn't about having any girl you want. That can seem great for a minute....and, I'm sure that if I was 21, that would be a lot better than it is now. Maybe that would be more fun. I don't know. I'm sure it would have been. The road gives a lot to you, and this whole business gives a lot to you, but it takes away too. I lost things that were really important to me...things that I thought would be with me my whole life. What do I have for myself from that period? I have a buncha money, and I have songs about periods of my life that are gone now. "Like, I have Goodnight Elisabeth. But Elisabeth just got married 2 weeks ago to somebody else. so, that's...that's gone..and that's gone because *I* was gone all the time. And not, like, doing anything wrong, not that I cheated on her ever, but it's gone. And, you know, that goes on...and, and...that's not heaven."

"The reason I said goodnight instead of good-bye is because I wanted it to be a lullaby...something she could remember it...us by. It’s a little sorted, that song, in places. Because I wanted to be honest about it too....I knew what I was going to do after I lost her. I knew that I would go out there and I would sleep with people. I would do anything to stop myself from thinking about her in the middle of the night....where she was...with some other guy or something. It’s like it says: I’ll wait for you in Baton Rouge, and I’ll miss you down in New Orleans, I’ll wait for you while that girl takes her clothes off, and I’ll wait for you while we’re having sex, and I’ll miss you while we’re having sex, but I’m still going to be doing that. That last verse is about that...the difference between me and her: You can wrap yourself in daffodils...me, the nut that I am, I’ll wrap myself in pain and mope about it all day long. But, you’re you and I’m the king of the rain."

Children in Bloom

Have You Seen Me Lately

"[It is]a howl which says "Not only do you not know me, but neither do I." It sums up the touring, fame, and everything, saying where it brought me to. "

I *wanted* to disappear everytime I heard myself on the radio. Not that I didn’t like hearing it, but after a while, you’re in a restaurant or in a bar somewhere, and it plays, and everyone looks at you, and it just creeped me out after a while. I felt that I couldn’t get into a place where people weren’t looking at me.

I think that the public, a lot of the time, have a tendency to color people in, who are famous. Make them their own image. Take what they believe a famous person should be, and what they’re like, and what they have, and how they’re life is, and color it into the person who may have nothing to do with that. That’s what the last verse of that song is about. It’s saying: Having felt that I was so disappearing, why didn’t somebody tell me this was happening. I thought somebody would notice. I thought somebody would say something if I was disappearing...if I was missing. And then he sort of screams out: can’t you see me? And then he says: OK, well then, color me in. If I’m everything you think I am...go on, color me in. And while you’re at it, make the sky green, make the...what is it...blue rain...make the rain blue, and make the sky black. If you can make me anything you want, go ahead and do that. Make the whole world anything you want. But, the he says: Give me your blue rain, give me your black sky...or just give me your green eyes...or your white skin. Something real. Do you really know who I am? Everyone was saying they did. I’m not sure they did.

You’re suddenly...you can become a very semi-private person who has trouble dealing with people, and the next day you belong to everyone. And, all I’m saying is that I’m not sure you get it, really. People come up to and they say “oh...we love you, we love you, can we take a picture with you?” Pictures make me uncomfortable. I can’t tell you why, but they do. And since they do, I probably shouldn’t do them. So, I’d say “I don’t really feel comfortable doing that.” They say “ya, well, screw you...we *made* you.” No you didn’t. The truth is, I was always me. I wasn’t nothing before this happened. I may not have been famous, I may not have been wealthy, but I was something. You don’t make somebody. You don’t. And, you can’t take it away either. That’s the thing people don’t realize. I appreciate what they’re saying....they’re just saying that “we appreciate what you do.” But, I couldn’t always take all that appreciation, sometimes. I just need a little space."

Miller's Angels

"So I wrote this song about the sort of suddenness of life. What if you lived in fear of that? What if there were angels, but instead of being benevolent, they were ambivalent, just there to do a job and hang between God and us or whatever? And they just hang there and wait 'til it's time to go pluck you off. And what if you couldn't stop thinking about it? "

Another Horsedreamers' Blues

Recovering the Satellites

" It makes sense as the title song for the album. It makes sense as a summary for the album. "

" [Recovering the Satellites] is an album about the uncertainty about the attempt to recover yourself. And it's also about the attempt to throw yourself off the cliff, that you have to recover yourself from. Because certainly the earlier portions of the album are about a great deal of turmoil inside myself and quite honestly, the desire to hurl myself off into oblivion on a couple of these songs. "

Monkey

"This is a song that we wrote while we were making the record [RTS]- looking forward to changes in life, and looking forward optimistically to next year.
This is a song about falling in love and all the possibilities."

Mercury

"Have you ever been crazy about someone who is just completely out of their mind - completely bad for you but there's just nothing you can do about it. This is a song about the most changeable girl in the world."

"This is a song about being in love with someone who is just so fucking difficult , so messed up but you just can't help it because, you know, when you're there , you're there."

A Long December

"I wrote it one night in the middle of the night. A friend of mine got hit by a car and was in the hospital. It seemed like everything was going shitty. At the time I was writing it, we'd started the record and we'd been working on it and we had all this great material, but I think I had a certain ambivalence about it myself. Am I ready to go into this again? It was so hard last time. I so much didn't ever want to play music again. But the song's really about all the people I didn't have a chance to tell it to and maybe the one person I was actually going to have a chance to finally tell it to at the right time.

I have to at least recognize what it was, which was something that was a part of my life that existed.

That's me in a nutshell--people leaving, me leaving, days going past. By the end of the song, what he says is "I can't remember all the times I tried to tell myself/ To hold on to these moments as they pass." You have to remember to hold on to these moments. Life can be flashing moments that pass by you and add up to nothing, or they can be things that you keep and cherish. Loss doesn't mean gone forever: you have your memories. The things you lose don't have to be such ghosts as we always make them out to be. They can be memories that we can keep--especially me, since I get to write songs about them. "

Walkaways

'I wanted to use it as a one-word thing because I wanted to suggest that it's a habitual thing, that it's actually something we have a word for, which suggests that it's something one does over and over again. And since it's something that I have done over and over again and had done to me, I called it that. "No big difference these days/ Just the same old walkaways/ And someday I'm gonna stay but not today." '