Romance askance: two lovers from different houses (as it were), diametrically opposed, dancing to the beat of a different drum, and so forth.

I love the groove of this song, and as with many of Mr Nagler and my collaborations, I went back over the original lyric (quite a few times) once I’d heard the direction he was heading in. He tells me his starting point was James Gadson’s drumming with Bill Withers; mine was the only recurrent nightmare I’ve ever had (maybe three times) - a woman gambling in a casino, the bids getting ever higher but the actual roulette ball never thrown, the card never played. Heaven knows what that means. Or what’s scary about it. I had it first when I was 12. And I wrote about it in Misfortune.

I really love the chorus where the song opens out, and that’s why I wanted the Herb Alpert horn, played by Matt Cappy, playing that same melody over a reprise of this chorus at the end. The verse structure is quite constricted and tight, without release, but when we get to “you’re not my flower/you’re not my weed”, it’s so expansive and beautiful. The moments of silence on this recording, in that sad penultimate verse, move me too.

This song had some odd lyrics before I started digging in and having it make actual sense. Things don’t always start that sensical or linear, because sometimes, initially, you just trust in the words to do the work in the interest of covering some paper with ink. “S equals D over T: QED” I originally sang, which at least makes some technical sense (I like an equation), which I then changed to “I’m just a pastime when baby needs feeding” (which must have meant something to me in the moment) before then the line finally resolved to “now all of your fanboys have flooded my feed” which couldn’t be clearer. Also I’ve never heard the word “feed” - in that newer sense - in a song. I wouldn’t put a word in a song for that reason alone, but it’s somehow obscurely pleasing because it’s now a quite casual and common use of the word. I would have been weird about putting, say, “fax” in a song all those years ago: too technological. It would have brought attention to itself. But this doesn’t worry me.

This song needed very careful placement in the sequence. And the cover of the single is of course Prada, Marfa, a sculptural installation designed by Scandinavian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, located on a remote stretch of U.S. Route 90 in West Texas. It’s right where we shot the One Last Heist video too.