This rather eerie and then-very-epic track suits the narrator, a cracked visionary offering his work to a (possibly) oppressive scientific board. The idea came from a book I’ve had for many years published by The Museum of Jurassic Technology (one of my happy places) called No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again, a collection of letters written from 1915-1935 to the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles by people of varying degrees of sanity and insight. I bought it in the gift shop there. The loneliness and arcane points of view of these letters touched me, and a song finally emerged many years later. Mr. Nagler gave this one an astonishing slinky melody, and a great arrangement, which I suggested get even crazier in the last verse and we torqued it until it could yield no more.

There’s an increasing amount going on in this song: flutes and synthesizers, trumpets, trombones, and saxes. But the bit I will always remember is David slowly and inexorably adding more and more instruments to that orchestral climax that lasts about three seconds in the middle of the song. I didn’t even really know what he was doing, but it slowly became clear as we progressed. It’s certainly a moment: scary and Herrmann-esque.

A few people have said this sounds like Timmy Thomas, and I can hear that in the drum machine pattern, and it’s true but unintentional. The sound of the track is more inspired by Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk (they used flute!), Pauline Anna Strom, and David got the delayed Rhodes idea from Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson’s “We Almost Lost Detroit.” I somewhat structured the record around this song.