the making of The Monitor by Titus Andronicus - featuring patrick stickles

Here’s more information about the One Song podcast mentioned at the start of the episode: https://luxxury.com/one-song

Intro: 

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim. 

Titus Andronicus formed in Glen Rock, New Jersey in 2005 by Patrick Stickles. The band lineup coalesced around Stickles, Liam Betson, Dan Tews, Ian Graetzer and Ian Dykstra by the time they made their first album. The local label, Troubleman Unlimited, agreed to put out their full-length debut. The Airing of Grievances was released in 2008 and was an unexpected success. XL Recordings became interested in signing the band and they agreed to rerelease the first album in 2009. Around this time, Eric Harm took over on drums while Stickles moved to Somerville, Massachusetts and began writing songs that would make up their next record. The Monitor was eventually released in 2010. In this episode, for the 15th anniversary, Patrick Stickles reflects on how the album came together. This is the making of The Monitor. 

 Patrick Stickles: Hey, this is Patrick Stickles of the rock band, Titus Andronicus, and I'm here on the Life of the Record podcast talking about our second album, The Monitor. For those 30 days, that studio, that barn in New Paltz, New York, was where I lived, and I didn't really leave the building at all for that entire month of August, 2009. I was just living and breathing it and just really in the thick of it. And in the movie you'll see that I looked like a completely disgusting hobo, like more than I even usually did at that time. God knows if I even had like a fucking toothbrush, but I certainly wasn't, you know, bathing every day or maybe even every week. I probably like was stinking that whole place up. But I was just, you know, in my mind that was just my level of dedication. Like, you know, I had total tunnel vision, you know, just complete eyes on the prize. Nothing else mattered. Like, “What am I gonna leave the studio for to like, go to like, eat at some restaurant?” Like, “no, what's that got to do with anything? I'm trying to make the greatest rock album of my generation.”

Alright, so to begin at the very beginning, I founded the band Titus Andronicus, in the year 2005. I was 19 years old and I was just wrapping up my freshman year of college in New Jersey where I'm from. In the years leading up to that, I had a band that I'd founded and maintained all through high school, which eventually coalesced around myself and two other guys, one of whom was Andrew Cedarmark, and the other one was a guy named Martin Courtney, who a lot of your listeners might know as the founder and leader of the band Real Estate. So I went to high school with these guys and we'd had this band. And when we graduated, we all ended up going to college in New Jersey. Eventually the other two guys decided they weren't really digging the whole New Jersey College thing anymore, and they transferred to colleges out of state. So I was kind of left behind in New Jersey without a band. I decided that I was gonna start a new band and that it would be a band that no one could take from me, a band that would be over when I decided it was over. And so therefore, I would be the guy who wrote all the songs for this band, and I would also sing the songs, and I would have a more flexible approach to maintaining the band personnel. And that band became Titus Andronicus. And all through my college years, like I said, it was just kind of a way to keep the party going from high school. And the band was mostly people that I'd known in high school who were either still living in Glen Rock, New Jersey, where I'm from, or people that had been from Glen Rock and we're going to school in New York City, such as the bass player, Ian Graetzer. But it was just kind of a fun thing for the weekend, and it was just an extension of the sort of hobby that rock and roll had been in high school, even though we had recorded an EP, a CD-R of five songs. And we were playing around the city, playing at places like, Cake Shop and Sin-e and all these different like, you know, Lower East Side-type spots. And so this sort of all, you know, culminated in the summer of 2007, we made our first album, which was called The Airing of Grievances. And that was never meant to be like a big deal. It was more so a document of where we were at at that time, where I was at with my songwriting or whatever. And it was gonna be the sort of thing that probably not many people would hear, Ian Graetzer worked as like, kind of like a intern, but like sort of just like an assistant to a record company outta Bayo, New Jersey called Troubleman Unlimited, which was run by a guy named Mike Simonetti. And he had been really impressed that we had gotten a seven-inch out. We put out one seven-inch on a label out of Portland called Shake Appeal Records. And we had used that as an impetus to go out on this little tour that we did that was like 10 days long, where we basically like drove to Chicago and back and played along the way. And he thought that was very impressive initiative for young guys like us to take. So he cut us a very cute little check so that we would have like a little budget to go and record an album, which he would put out on Troubleman Unlimited. And that's exactly what we did. And that record, which was called The Airing of Grievances, like I said, came out on Troubleman Unlimited in April of 2008, which is when Ian Graetzer and myself were both about to graduate from college. And I had this whole plan that I was going to go to graduate school to study to become an English teacher, which was the career path that I was on. And I'd already gotten into almost every graduate school that I applied to, and very fancy ones I might add at the risk of sounding immodest. So I was on a pretty nice career path for a guy like me as far as, you know, pursuing my higher education with an eye towards having like a regular real job and a career when it was over. But then unexpectedly, the record that we put out became something of a smash hit, like runaway success. Like we had gotten some rather good notices in the music press, particularly Pitchfork Media, which was a very, very influential site in those days. And all of a sudden this band enterprise that had been just kind of like a fun thing, started to look like it maybe was gonna have more legs than we had thought or intended. And so Ian Graetzer and myself and the drummer that we had at that time, Eric Harm, we kind of decided that we should just give it a shot because we had the opportunity to do so. We'd gotten a booking agent, there was an awareness about this band that would enable us to tour the country like a lot more seriously. We were getting more and more offers to come and play all sorts of different places. And we were just like, “Well, whatever,” like, “we're young, we might as well just do it.” And I said to myself, you know, “fuck going to graduate school, like this kind of sounds like lame and annoying anyway.” So that was exactly what we did. And for the next year, we just traveled all over America and indeed the world and sort of cut our teeth and, you know, became a little more experienced and seasoned and grew as musicians a little bit, not too much obviously, but got to be just a little bit more of a professional organization. And we bought a Chevy Express 3500 passenger van, and we would throw the amplifiers and the drums in the back of that van and we would just drive and drive to get any place that would have us.

So at the same time that all this is going on, that the first Titus Andronicus record is blowing up and everybody's loving it, and we're starting to get out on the road and take ourselves seriously. I also have this girlfriend with whom I've been, you know, long distance for like a couple of years. I had known her in high school as well, but she moved up to Boston to go to one of those fancy schools that they got there and on and off we had tried to make the relationship work with the long distance thing. And I would often go drive up there, take the bus up there, the Fung Wah bus to spend time with her and sort of just pursue our long standing romance. And I was thinking about, you know, going to graduate school up there myself cause she had gotten some job in like a laboratory. She was like a scientist, a neurobiologist, and it was looking like I might go to grad school there. So we were like, “Well this will be great because, you know, we've been dealing with this long distance for so long and as everybody knows, long distance is the wrong distance.” But of course I scuttled the graduate school plans because rock stardom was calling me. So then I was like, “Well we've given our booking agent the directive that we want to go out and work as hard as we possibly can and play every show that we get offered. So I'm not going to be around very much, so it doesn't really matter where I live exactly. Like it's not that important if I live in New Jersey where the other guys in the band are, because it's not like we're even gonna be rehearsing, we're just gonna be playing shows anywhere that we possibly can.” So the decision was made that I would move up to Boston so that when I did have time off the road, I could spend it with this girlfriend that I had. And so we found a place in Somerville, Massachusetts, and that was where we tried to see what we could do with a more grownup version of our long distance romance. At the same time that I made this move to Massachusetts, to Somerville, two other things were happening. One is that I had started to smoke a lot of weed, a lot of marijuana, because on the first Titus Andronicus tour of the full United States, I had never been to California before as an adult anyway. And when we went out there and we were playing like the punk houses and like playing on like the Cali DIY scene, people were smoking a lot of weed. Like they just had a ton of weed out there. And like we would stay at people's houses and they'd be like, “Oh yeah, we have like a huge like marijuana farm in the backyard,” and they would just hand us over like just this huge, like, amounts of weed, like for free. So that was like the culture out there and so we were just smoking weed all the time. And when I got back home, I was like, “This weed smoking thing is like pretty cool, it's like really like kind of expanding my mind.” So I would get into that. And this girlfriend that I had, that I was living with, like I said, she had a, like a quite a real grownup job at that laboratory. So she would go to bed at a regular hour and I would stay up late and smoke this pot that I'd gotten so interested in. And at the same time that I was staying up late by myself and smoking all this pot, I found out about a documentary film by a guy named Ken Burns called The Civil War. And it was a very aptly descriptively named movie because it was about the American Civil War. And this was like a 9, 10 or 11 hour documentary. And I guess maybe I acquired the DVD box set or something somehow, and I would stay up late, you know, high as a kite and watch this movie and just be completely astounded, not only by what a, a cinematic triumph it was. But the way that it illuminated, you know, these things from American history that, you know, we're taught in school sometimes, but take for granted quite a bit and don't really think about so much of the things we learn in school. You know, we absorb it for a little while and then we kind of just forget it, if we ever absorbed it at all. So I hadn't retained like any of my knowledge of that period of history, but watching this film and hearing, you know, the beautiful words of Abraham Lincoln brought to life on the screen, and just the way that Mr. Burns laid out the series of conflicts and divisions that resulted in that catastrophe that, you know, nearly ruined and ended our young nation is just like really wild and eyeopening for like a young guy who's, you know, stepping out into the adult world for the first time and also smoking a lot of pot and getting high a lot.

So, like I said, the first Titus Andronicus record came out on a label outta Bayonne, New Jersey called Troubleman Unlimited, which was run by this guy Mike Simonetti. And Mike had a relationship with this guy in England whose name was Chris Casa. And Chris worked for a record company called Merok, M-E-R-O-K. And Merok at the time was a subsidiary of XL Recordings, which was a British record company that initially got to be a big deal when they released The Prodigy and the Prodigy album, Fat of the Land that had “Firestarter.” So Chris Casa was able to convince his bosses to get invested in this Titus Andronicus record and release it in England because Troubleman Unlimited didn't really have international distribution like that. And at the same time in America, the American branch of XL Recordings was run by a guy named Chris Chen. And at the time Chris Chen had a lot of clout within the company because he was the guy that signed Vampire Weekend and sort of oversaw and kind of helped to design their meteoric rise to the top of the indie rock pantheon at that time. All your listeners are gonna remember that in 2008, Vampire Weekend was like the biggest thing in the world as far as a lot of people were concerned. Chris Chen, however, had something of a secret punk rock past, and he grew up in Texas and he had seen Fugazi live 14 times, that was the statistic that he used to like to cite, and I guess he decided that one of the ways he wanted to spend the clout and the capital that he had at XL was to sign a band that was a little bit more of a proper punk rock band, which I guess Titus Andronicus was, certainly more so than Vampire Weekend. Nothing against them, you know, they were the, “A-Punk” band, but they were not a punk band, if you know what I mean. And through some careful negotiation and wheeling and dealing on the part of our attorney, Matthew Kaplan, it was decided that we would be signed to Merok in the UK and they would re-release the first album over there and we would be signed to the primary American branch of XL in the United States under Chris Chen. And that was how we ended up being labelmates with Adele. You know, now we're signed to XL, there's a big advance on the way, there is an audience for this music that this band is making, there is an appetite of some sort in a market for my songwriting. I want to do something important, or at the very least do something important to me. I want to take full advantage of the opportunity that I have. I recognize that this opportunity is very possibly going to be very short lived. I have the means and the resources and the budget to attempt to make a grand statement and to make the ultimate rock and roll album and to create like a generational masterpiece, or this is what's going on in my pot adelled brain at the time anyway. Because the other movie that I'm watching is the Bruce Springsteen documentary Wings for Wheels, which is about the making of his album Born to Run. And I'm watching this movie and I'm seeing that Bruce Springsteen, who seems like such an untouchable rock deity now really at his back up against the wall in like 1974, because his first two albums hadn't done very well. And the record company was maybe losing patience with him and he wasn't maybe turning out to be the sure thing that certain people thought he was at one time. But he has an opportunity to make at least one more record, his third record. And he decides that if this is the last chance that he has to make a record, that he's gonna leave it all on the table and he's gonna just really go for it. And whether or not he has the talent to do so, he's going to attempt to achieve greatness and make the ultimate rock and roll album and his dream of what the perfect rock album would be with the means and resources and the skillset that he had at that time. And I'm watching that and I'm thinking, “Well, that sounds like a great idea.” Like I didn't reckon that it was, whatever record I was about to make was gonna put me on the cover of Time and Newsweek like it did for Bruce Springsteen. But I liked the idea of taking a big swing. And I liked the humility of Bruce Springsteen who will admit that he is not some kind of supernaturally talented musician with these like special God-given abilities that just make him like a natural virtuoso genius in the way that maybe like a Paul McCartney or somebody we might think of. Bruce Springsteen was a guy who had a lot of guts and he was a guy that really liked to work hard, and he was a guy that liked to squeeze what talent he had for everything it was possibly worth. And he believed that whatever level of talent he was given by God or whoever else, that was not necessarily the deciding factor in whether or not he could achieve greatness or make the perfect rock album. Because as we know, rock music is not really about being talented or making something that's actually perfect. It's about personality and heart and grit and guts, and that counts for a lot more then if you can sing like an angel or  pull like these unforgettable, pristine melodies out of your ass anytime you want. So between watching that Bruce Springsteen documentary and watching the Ken Burns documentary and smoking all the pot and moving up to Massachusetts and getting out on the road with the band and signing this big record deal, all these factors going on in my life pointed me towards the record that I felt like I wanted to make. 

“A More Perfect Union” 

“A More Perfect Union,” the opening track on the album and the song that made me famous and the song that they'll put on my tombstone. “A More Perfect Union” is a song about driving, and it's a song about driving towards something, but also very much about driving away from something, driving away from a past, driving away from an environment that you didn't choose, an upbringing that maybe didn't suit you, and driving towards some kind of imagined future or towards some kind of promised land where you are going to have a new life and a lot more agency. And the ability to become the person that you believe yourself to be and be a lot more autonomous in the process of becoming that person rather than just living on the same straight line that you've been expected to where you'll just replace the people that came before you, only to be replaced yourself when it's your turn and just be grist for the mill. And it's about the feeling of being in the car and tearing up the highway. And imagining that there's like a big wide open world in front of you that's yours for the taking. And this is, you know, one of the great themes in rock music, you know, “Roadrunner” by the Modern Lovers could be the perfect example. Bruce Springsteen “Thunder Road” would be another one. There's a million of them. It's one of the most classic archetypes for a rock song. And this, “A More Perfect Union” was my entry to that cannon. And not unlike “Thunder Road” on the Born to Run album, it is the opening of our story and our narrator is escaping from somewhere in his mind. He's on to bigger and better things and new adventures and it just a much more wide open world. And it describes very much what my life was like at that time, you know, both in terms of being on the road with the rock band, but also commuting back and forth from New Jersey to Boston, which is something I'd done a lot over the previous few years cause of that girlfriend I mentioned. So there was a lot of time in the car driving between Boston and New York and back and forth. And driving on all those highways I mentioned, you know, New Jersey, Route 17, Interstate 80, Interstate 84, the Merritt Parkway, all these different arteries that connected these metro areas. I'm singing about that part of my life, that routine, and this is also where I wrote the song is in the car. Like the thing that I'm singing about is actually happening to me as I'm writing it. And this was how a lot of the songs on the record came together, is just me on these long drives 'cause I didn't have like, you know, a CD player in the car or anything, aybe like cassette player, but, you know, going places where I don't know, the radio stations and just kind of having these ideas in my head that I'm trying to expand on and to create a record I'm driving and I just, you know, think of the lyrics and I just come up with these ideas and kind of just sing them to myself. This was before smartphones and everything so many times I would have to, you know, pull over either on, you know, the gas station or even just on the side of the road and look around the car for like a piece of paper or like some cardboard or something and try and find like a pen or a Sharpie marker and write these lyrics down before I forgot them. So at many of the ends of these drives, I would have, you know, the songs that would become this record and “A More Perfect Union” is one of those songs.

I should also say it's divided into two parts. You know, there's the first half of the song, which is more like regular rock, which is the very hopeful and optimistic part. It's just about the most hopeful, optimistic piece of music in my entire catalog. And then there is the second half of it, which is like kind of the more Irish sounding part, which is when our narrator, our hero, discovers that the new world which he's entering is actually not that different from the previous one. And the forces by which he was beset in his old life are still present and still ready to do their wicked work. And this change of scenery, this change of lifestyle has not actually solved his problems internally or externally. And that is kind of the beginning of our story. “A More Perfect Union” pretty much was always going to be the opening track and like the schematic of the album. And here's a tip for any young artist out there, if you have an album to write, it can be useful early on in the process to decide what the themes and the motifs and what the larger story of the album is going to be. If you're the sort of person that likes these kinds of concept albums and rock operas and stuff, that can be very useful because when you have those themes in place and you basically know what it is that you want to talk about, it eliminates a lot of the guesswork and it takes away the, a lot of the terror of the empty page. Because sometimes when you sit down to write a song or to create any piece of art, you can become paralyzed by how many options there are out there as far as things to discuss or subject matters to explore. So if early on in the process, you decide what it is that you want to talk about, like, you know, in my case, “I'm gonna do this whole civil war thing,” that makes it a lot easier to just kind of put one foot in front of the other during the process. So in the case of “A More Perfect Union,” I was like, “Well, look at me, I got this kind of like, upbeat, heraldic, sort of anthemic bunch of riffs and melodies here. This is like, could be pretty exciting as like an opening track. Why don't I just go ahead and see if I can come up with some lyrics that will be like a good introduction to the little story that I'm trying to tell?” Which to me was a lot easier than if I would've just said, “Oh, well I can write about anything in the world. I can't decide, so I'm gonna just write nothing,” which is a trap that, you know, that artist can fall into sometimes. But it didn't get me that time.

So as I'm watching this film and the film is explaining how America got itself in such a tight spot and how these two opposing camps within the American government and the American culture just couldn't quite get on the same page, it seemed very familiar and it seemed very modern and contemporary to me as far as the things that I'd been observing in my young adulthood from the George W. Bush years, and this was the very beginning of the Obama era when I was watching this film. And it seemed to me that the problems that had been the impetus for the American Civil War in the 1860s, hadn't really been resolved. And that the issues and the problems explained in the film were very much the issues that we as a country were facing at that time. And indeed, we seem to be facing still today. At the same time, I've also become aware of a concept in postmodernism, whatever that is, that certain people have a tendency to define themselves by an absence. To put it another way, they frame their own identity in the negative, rather than saying, you know, “I'm X,” they say, “I'm not Y.” More and more, I started to think that a lot of people that had really loud voices and really strong opinions about things maybe weren't defining themselves or their identity or their ideology in a positive way, but rather defining themselves negatively in opposition to something else, and feeling very strongly about that. And this was creating like what we would later, you know, commonly call “Tribalism.” Within America, like within our political system and within our culture where we have a deeply polarized citizenry and electorate who are full of vitrol and hatred for the people that they perceive to be on the opposing team. And this hatred and this opposition that they have to the other side is more important to them than what their side actually believes or claims to believe. And these people seem to not care to think about like, “What do I want? What do I actually believe in? What do I think is right?” and are far more concerned with “Whatever I perceive the other side to believe, I am simply going to believe the opposite of that.” And this was a, you know, a trend that I saw emerging, you know, in the culture and in the media, and even in just, you know, day-to-day interactions I would have with regular people. This was a trend that I found to be kind of alarming, but something that I was interested in exploring to the best of my marijuana, addled, insomniac ability.

So if you are gonna talk about “A More Perfect Union,” the song, obviously we need to talk about the iconic opening monologue that opens the track and indeed the album. And this was a recitation performed by a really incredible man named Okie Canfield Chenoweth III, and Mr. Chenoweth was the drama teacher at Glen Rock High School in Glen Rock, New Jersey, where I'm from. And he was a serious local legend that had taught drama at the high school for like 30 or 40 years or something by the time that I became his student around the year 2000. And he had taught my older brother and he had directed him as the lead in Eugene Ian ESCO's Rhinoceros, which was a very heady play. And it was really, you know, a formative experience for me watching my brother perform this role when I was like eight or nine, I guess, and I eventually became Mr. Chenoweth's student. And he was an incredible man and he actually just passed away a few months ago. So I've thought about him, you know, a little more than usual lately. But he was something else and he is, you know, a, a towering figure in my early life and taught me, you know, some of the most valuable lessons in the arts. Just studying under him for just two years. You know, he's had like as much of an impact on me as anybody else in my artistic development and, and more than most. And his big thing was truthfulness. He really wanted you, when you got up on stage, like whatever you were gonna say, the important thing was that the audience believed you, or rather, you know, the audience believed, no matter how outlandish the thing that you were saying was, the audience would believe that you believed it. Like Mr.Chenoweth directed me in Hamlet, where I played the ghost of Hamlet's father. So I get up on stage and I say, “I am your father's spirit.” And like obviously I'm not, I'm just the high school kid who's very much alive. But the point of his direction was often just trying to get us to deliver the lines with like the necessary conviction that the audience would think that you really believed what you were saying. That was like his main thing because nobody wants to see a guy up on stage who like probably doesn't really mean whatever he's saying. Nobody wants to see that. Mr. Chenoweth's other big thing was raising the stakes. You know, whatever action you're doing on stage, you know, whatever kind of situation you're in, if it's not working and if it's not coming across to the audience, then you would just raise the stakes, start behaving as though it's more important than it actually is. That could be something, you know, like if the guy in the scene like you know, can't find his pen or something, you know, just for an example like his direction would be like, “Act as though if you don't find the pen, you're gonna die. Or like the world will explode if you don't find this pen.” Like that's where he liked the stakes to be on the stage and in the arts. And though I'm not an actor exactly, this idea of like trying to be truthful or you know, presenting a version of truthfulness while also raising the stakes and ratcheting up the intensity and just generally doing whatever you're doing with a lot of conviction and commitment to the bit, are, you know, values that I tried very deliberately to keep with me throughout my career in the arts. So that was Okey Chenowith for you in a nutshell. And he was kind enough when we were making the first Titus Andronicus record, he allowed me to come over to his house on Route 202 in Oakland, New Jersey with my little 4-track cassette recorder. And he read for me a passage from The Stranger by Albert Camus, which was a, you know, very important book to me at that time. And after the first record did so well, Mr. Chenoweth did such a fantastic job with that reading, I said, “Well, why don't we take, we're taking everything about the first album up, at least one notch, maybe I should, you know, get Mr. Chenoweth, give him an even larger role on the second record.” And by that point, I'd kind of decided that we were gonna go with this Civil War thing, and I've been watching the Ken Burns movie and in the first episode of the Ken Burns movie, there is a reading or a recitation from Abraham Lincoln's address to the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum. I'm just watching episode one of the Civil War documentary. And all of a sudden, Sam Waterson, who we remember from Law and Order, he starts reading this speech, you know, “From wence shall we expect the approach of danger?” But I'm listening to this speech and this incredible performance by Sam Waterson, and I'm just like, completely gobsmacked. Like this almost knocks me on the floor. Like, I couldn't believe that I'd never heard these words before. Like I thought this was just the greatest string of words that anybody had ever put together. Like the speech has become a lot more famous now, but at the time I had never heard it before and I was just like, “holy guacamole.” Like, “this is the best thing there is and I'm gonna take this,” because that was my attitude at the time and I guess still is that, you know, anything that's out there in the air and certainly in the public domain, I can use that for my own selfish purposes. So that's exactly what I did. And I went out and I got a book of Abraham Lincoln's writings and his speeches, and it had that address in it. And I brought it over to Mr. Chenoweth’s house in Oakland, along with my little 4-track cassette recorder, just like I'd done for the first album. And I had him read that speech into the little microphone that I brought. And, you know, the incredible actor that Mr. Chenowith was, a very talented guy with a lot of gravitas. And he delivered that monologue really beautifully and gave me like a really nice way to kick off this album. 

And I would like to say, I didn't realize it at the time, but I actually completely fucked myself when I did this. A lot of the times records have skits, like it was early on, you know, that was very common in, you know, hip hop, that they would have samples or like, stuff from like movies like Wu-Tang Clan, of course, was probably the best at this. They would fill up their albums with all these excerpts from all the, the old kung fu movies that they would watch as kids. And so you'd put in the Wu-Tang Clan CD and you'd be greeted by some dialogue from a kung fu movie and maybe like some, you know, sound effects and stuff. And then one of RZA’s incredible beats would drop and you would be off to the races. And that's like a great experience for the listener and this practice, you know, to give credit where it's due, in the indie rock world, this was normalized by Bright Eyes, you know, all those early Bright Eyes albums usually would start off with like some kind of skit. And as a fan of those records at the time, I thought that was a cool thing. To me, it was very effective way to start the listening experience. And plenty of other rock acts were doing it. It was like a thing and like pop punk and emo as well. So it was, it was normalized within rock music. This tradition that, you know, as far as I knew it started in hip hop, was now fair game for rock. So I said, well, “Look at me like I got this great speech, these incredible words of Abraham Lincoln, you know, recited beautifully by Mr. Chenoweth, who's such an important guy to me and so talented. And I've got this like certified banger, like this crazy heat rock of a opening track that's like,” you know, I don't know it yet, but everyone's gonna say, this is my best ever song. So like, “What could be more perfect than this?” And to have, when Mr. Chenoweth gets to that part about, “as a nation of free men will live together or die by suicide,” all that, you know, guitar feedback and stuff that had been percolating in the background, you know, bust in with that big driving rock beat from Eric Harm and we're off. Like we really are, like, you know, blasting into hyperdrive at that point. And at the risk of sounding immodest, like, I think that what we achieved with that introduction was the absolute apotheosis of that whole idea of having like, some kind of skit or monologue or spoken sampled thing bust into like a big awesome song. Nobody has done it better than we did at that time before or since. In my humble opinion, like we nailed it. Like that was the perfect version of that idea in my humble opinion. But what I didn't realize at the time was that I was completely fucking myself in the long term. What you have to understand when all these choices are being made, this is the year 2009, and there's no such thing as Spotify. There's no streaming as far as we know. This album is going to be received by the audience as you know, a piece of vinyl or a compact disc, or worst case scenario, it's going to be an iTunes download, okay? You can't just listen to it on a whim for free on the internet. I mean, you can though, you can get it for free, cause you can download it on Napster or Limewire or Soul Seek or whatever at the time. But as far as we knew the listener's experience was going to be acquiring this album as a singular, cohesive piece of art, like a single object, one product, and it was going to be absorbed as such, people were gonna get it, whether it was the CD, the vinyl, the download, whatever, and they were gonna have it, and they were gonna put it on and they were gonna listen to it. And I thought this whole spoken intro busting into this classic song was the perfect way to begin that experience for the listener. And everybody that's heard it agrees with me like it is an awesome experience for people that had the experience that way. But when you look at the way that the music industry is now, and the different way that music is consumed, what happens to me all the time now, I've realized in just like the past year or so, people find out, oh, “There's this band called Titus Andronicus, they're supposed to be pretty good or whatever. I'll check 'em out. Or my friend says, Titus Andronicus is good. I'm gonna listen to 'em.” Or I meet somebody in real life that doesn't know that I'm a musician, and they say, “Oh, you're in a band, what's it called?” I say, “Titus Andronicus.” They say, “I'll check it out.” So a hundred out of a hundred times when people go to check out this music, they go to Spotify or you know, whatever streaming service they're using, and they see that the most played Titus Andronicus song is called “A More Perfect Union.” And by far it's the most played, it's the most popular song that we've got by a factor of five. And so it's only right that these people will say, “Oh, well I'll listen to this and that will be my introduction to the music of Titus Andronicus.” And then so they press play on it and they're expecting some kind of rock and roll song and what instead they have is this elderly man reciting this speech from fricking, you know, 170 years ago and there's like weird noises percolating in the background and there's like a whole minute of that before the band kicks in with like the real song. And lately it seems to me that that has probably been a huge hindrance to, you know, Titus Andronicus continuing to grow our audience because everybody that's like, “Oh yeah, I'll check that band out.” They go and they play the first song that they see and it's not a fucking song. Like they're not gonna sit there for a whole minute, more likely than not. I think they probably, you know, a lot of them I think have listened to 10 seconds and they're like, “Who's this elderly man? I'm turning this off.” And then that's it with them and Titus Andronicus music. You know, it never occurred to me until very recently, but I'd really have to wonder like how many people got Titus Andronicus recommended to them and maybe would've liked everything about the band and become huge fans of ours, but weren't able to sit through a whole minute of this strange monologue and just never came back. So I really wonder about that, and I do think that I might have totally fucked myself by achieving the absolute pinnacle of the whole opening a record with a little skit concept. But I guess if I could go back in time, I wouldn't change anything because it is so banging.

“Titus Andronicus Forever” 

Another thing that you have to understand is that The Monitor album has like a certain structure, it's intended to be like a symmetrical thing. So there's 10 tracks on it, right? And the first track, “A More Perfect Union” is kind of like a prologue. I kind of got the idea from Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, which as we recall, opens with a little scene where, you know, this guy goes to attend a play, and then the play that he watches is, you know, “The Taming of the Shrew.” And it's like a little framing story. So I was like, “Maybe I could do something kind of like that, because I'm already on this whole Shakespeare kick with this Titus Andronicus naming convention.” So “A More Perfect Union” functions as a kind of prologue and the 10th and final track, “The Battle of Hampton Roads” functions as a kind of epilogue. As we move inward, each of those tracks has a neighbor, which is a variation of the same song. This is tracks two and track eight are variations on the song “Titus Andronicus Forever.” And if you look on the liner notes, you see that the actual title is “Titus Andronicus Forever (or Theme from The Monitor).” So basically like “A More Perfect Union” is kind of like the cold open, as we call it in the TV business. And then “Titus Andronicus Forever (or Theme from The Monitor)” is actually like, now we will actually begin the story, like the curtain is rising and this is our theme song, which is, you know, going to like try and encapsulate as concisely as possible the thesis statement of the album, which is that the enemy is everywhere. That's like the big, that's the lyric that everybody remembers. And with that song out of the way, then we will actually begin our proper story, which isn't even really like a linear story exactly, but more of like a series of, I guess, six vignettes that will each offer their own take on what it means for the enemy to be everywhere. And if you like, when we go through it and when we talk about each of the tracks, we can check in and say, where is the enemy now according to this particular song? That was the function of it, structurally speaking was to say, “This is what's happening. The enemy's everywhere. Get used to it. Let's talk about it and now let's begin our show. This is my thesis and now I'm about to beat you over the head with it until you see that indeed I am correct.” 

I should say like this song, it only took me like about 30 seconds to write it. As soon as I hit upon this idea that the enemy's everywhere, that kind of already suggested the melody to me. And then once I had that, I was like, well, I can just put this over a blues riff. And then I came up with a second line, “Nobody seems to be worried or care that the enemy is everywhere.” Meaning like, you know, the enemy being everywhere is a big problem, but the general public is like so anesthetized and so like numb to the world around them. They're not worried that the enemy is everywhere. They don't even care. They might not even know it because they’re, you know, their head is so deep in the sand. So just to come up with those two lyrics and put 'em on top of a blues riff with the little rudimentary melody that occurred to me, that literally took about 30 seconds. Like it took almost as long to write it as it takes to sing it. 'cause it's just the same verse three times or whatever. So it was very, very easy thing to do. It was kind of like just there, I just had to like, pull it from the earth, like a potato and feast upon it. And, you know, it was just, it's an iconic and memorable little song that was just a gift. It was just a gift from heaven, you know, God just dropped it into my lap and, and you know, said like, “Here this'll make your little rock opera, or whatever the hell it is, concept album, a lot easier for the people to understand.” And it's the gift that keeps on giving because people love putting it in their movies and TV shows and stuff. Like, it was just in like last month or something. It was on this CBS procedural mystery drama show called Watson. And it's been in a bunch of other shit, it's been in the HBO show Bored to Death. It was in the movie Premium Rush where Joseph Gordon Levitt plays a New York City bike messenger who gets into trouble somehow. All these movies and TV shows, like the idea of like having a song that tells their audience that the enemy is everywhere.

"No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future"

“No Future Part Three,” as the title implies, is the third installment of the No Future Saga, which is a little miniature series within the larger Titus Andronicus Discography. “No Future Parts One and Two” appear on the first record, The Airing of Grievances and “No Future Parts Four and Five” appear on The Most Lamentable Tragedy, which is a rock opera we put out in 2015. But for the purposes of our discussion now, “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future” is the one on The Monitor, so let's talk about that one. You know, not to get into a whole big thing about it, but the whole No Future Saga is, you know, my little series of songs where I kind of discuss my experiences with, you know what, at the time I would've probably called like my Melancholia or something, you know, or my Little Blue Devils, or My Depressive Tendencies, because at the time of writing The Monitor album, I didn't really have an understanding of my own bipolarity. We can get into that a lot more in five years when we do the 15th anniversary of the rock opera episode. But for now, I'll just say throughout my life, I just have had this long history with different kind of psychopharmacological drugs. You know, like they put me on Ritalin when I was a kid, when I was like, you know, five or six or something. And they sent me off to this special school cause I was such a problem child. And they sent me to all these different doctors and therapists and stuff, like, to try and figure out why I was the way I was, why I was making so much trouble, why I couldn't behave, you know, like why I wasn't doing good in the regular school or like all this stuff. So I had a very short life before, you know, the decision was made that there needed to be a medical intervention, which was putting me on Ritalin. Over the years, like, you know, there's just, there's a long list of different drugs that they've given me to try and like, make me a more productive, you know, member of society.

Around the time that I started writing songs for the second Titus Andronicus album, even before I had hit on the whole civil war thing of it all, I was kind of like, you know, wrapping up my college career or maybe I was like a junior at college or something, and just like very unhappy, like miserable, like absolutely hated my life. Which makes a lot of sense in retrospect because, you know, this college was, you know, not the place for me. Like, I had no friends. Like my classmates were the biggest bunch of fucking morons and assholes you could ever hate to meet. You know, I had a lot of good, you know, professors that taught me a lot of valuable things. But like, you know, this environment was just like not conducive at all to me. Like, you know, having any kind of happiness or fulfillment. And everybody hated me, they all thought I was weird, they were exactly, you know, the kind of fucking New Jersey bozos that I thought I was gonna escape when I got out of high school. But, you know, there they were anyway, and of course there I was, and like I've been, you know, troubled tormented guy my entire life anyway. So eventually, you know, I went to go see this doctor, and I told this guy like, “I'm pretty fucking miserable. Like, I'm deeply unhappy person for the most part.” And he's like, “Well, I'm gonna give you this drug called Lexapro.” And you know, we don't have to get into a big thing about it. That was not the right drug for me, but it was the drug that they gave me and it was the drug that I took cause I didn't know any better. That would come back to bite me in the ass, you know, a few years later and there's a whole other album about that. But for the purposes of our discussion about The Monitor, I went to this man, to this doctor with this problem that I had, which is that I was very unhappy, miserable person. And he said, “Take this drug, this Lexapro, and you know, very possibly it'll make you feel better and you'll be happier.” And I was like, “Well, that kind of sounds nice, I guess.” So that's what I did. But as I, you know, made the decision to go along with what he was suggesting, it gave me this feeling like. Like I was like cheating or something, or I was like being somewhat inauthentic or that I was like doing myself, my authentic self a disservice. This doctor tells me if I take this drug then things are gonna get better. I just wasn't completely convinced that that was like a good or fair thing for me to be doing, you know, rightly or wrongly. It made me feel like a poser, it made me feel like kind of a sellout, it made me feel like I wasn't tough enough to feel the way that I was feeling and to deal with my life on its own terms. So I needed to like, you know, take this drug to do for me what I couldn't do for myself, which was pull me out of the funk that I was in. And I'm not saying that that's right, that I felt that way. And I think that, you know, there can be a lot of benefits to a lot of different kinds of medications and stuff. And I, you know, continue to regulate my bipolarity with Lamictal nowadays. And if we go back to our thing about, you know, the enemy's everywhere, right? So where is the enemy right now? For me, in “No Future Part Three,” the enemy is the part of myself that just can't get it together and just can't be happy for whatever reason. And I am going to combat this part of myself with the aid of this drug, this Lexapro. And you know, in the song I say like, you know, “There's a robot that lives in my brain and he tells me what to do.” That was my way of saying, you know, “I have for sworn trying to live as my authentic self and I would prefer to be, you know, a robot, to be an automaton and just if not actually be happy, at least numb myself through this drug to, you know, the pain that I'm in and that I've been in for so long.” And again, I'm not saying that I was right when I felt that way, but that was the way that I felt, or I felt it enough at that time that I wanted to make a song about it.

Again, I don't want to say like, you know, “Kids at home don't take your medicine because if you do, you're a poser.” I'm definitely not saying that. If anything, I'm saying the opposite. There's so much in my work and my career, you know, there are moments in life when you feel these things and these are valid feelings and they deserve to be validated through song. I would never tell a kid not to take their medicine. I think there are good medicines and there are bad medicines depending on who you are and what your issue is. And it can be a long and difficult process to find the right medication for you. But I do think it's a worthwhile thing to do if that's something that you need to do, and it's something that I have needed to do. At the time when I started taking this Lexapro, this was the way I felt. You know, every record is just kind of like a snapshot of where you're at.

"Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Dimensions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem)" 

Ideally on like a concept album like this, you would want the form and the function to kind of be aligned. So if I'm going with this Civil War motif for this extended metaphor that can guide my lyric writing, it points in a certain direction with the music as well. And you know, you'll notice there's a lot of like military type drum beats, big salute to, you know, the fabulous Eric Harm who did all the incredible drumming on this record. But the kind of the military beats, like the big, like major key melodies that were definitely informed by, you know, the old Civil War songs, like, you know, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “John Brown's Body,” “Battle Cry of Freedom,” the kind of melodies that you could imagine being played on, like a bugle. The idea was that, you know, the lyrical content and the musical content would mirror each other in such a way to, you know, create a, you know, a more cohesive hole. And it was useful for me as a songwriter once again, because, you know, in a world of, you know, infinite musical possibilities, this pointed me in a direction with the melodies and the arrangements and the sorts of beats, and that was helpful. 

I believe the title to be “Richard II (Two)” and the song, the reason it has that name, I just happen to have the guitar here purely by coincidence. So if I can illustrate what I'm talking about, the reason that it's called “Richard II” is because there is a song called simply “Richard,” which is by a man named Billy Bragg, who is like one of my most, you know, important influences and heroes and role models at the time that I was writing this album. And on his debut EP, Life’s a Riot, he had a song called “Richard.” And it went like this, right? (sings) “Richard belongs to Jane. Jane belongs to yesterday. How can I go on when every alpha particle has a neon nucleus.” Okay so if you take just the cadence of what he was singing and you do a little variation on the melody and put some different chords under it, then you get some that sounds like, (sings) “Richard belongs to Jane. Jane belongs to yesterday. How can I go on when every alpha particle has a neon nucleus.” which is my song, “Richard II.” So basically I just took the cadence or the scansion of the Billy Bragg song, and I came up with these different chords and this slight variation of the melody and started saying that I wrote it, which Billy Bragg would've been fine with because he did it all the time. And he's got a bunch of songs where he, you know, takes the melody or the scansion from, you know, a Bob Dylan song or you know, he's got songs where the tune is, you know, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” or “Cry of Freedom” or whatever. So he was doing it all the time and it was legal as far as he was concerned. So I said I'm gonna, you know, take a little bit of Billy Bragg's song, “Richard,” turn it into my own thing, and to kind of tip my hat to that, I will call the song “Richard II,” which is also funny to me because as we know, you know, the name of the band, Titus Andronicus, comes from a Shakespeare play and Shakespeare has this, play called Richard II, which is about the titular King, which I did not read, but I definitely read Richard III, which was awesome.

But the title doesn't have anything to do with the subject matter because when we went in to make the album, this song hadn't really been finalized. Like I hadn't written the lyrics for this song, and I might not have even finished them until we were actually like in the studio recording it. Because if you go back and you listen to the original demo tape that Titus Andronicus made, that had all the songs from the second album, “Richard II” doesn't have any lyrics. It's just instrumental. So I guess I figured, like I would just write the lyrics later. At the time that we were getting ready to record the album, I was dating this girl who is like quite a historian, you know, especially about like New York City history. So I told her like, “Yeah, you know, I'm almost done writing this album. I've got like this whole civil war thing going on, but I gotta finish, you know, I don't have any lyrics for this one last song.” And she was like, “Well, why don't you write a song about the New York City draft riots of 1863?” And I was like, “What's that?” And so she got me this book by this guy named Iver Bernstein, which helpfully is titled The New York City Draft Riots. And it tells the story of this riot that occurred over a couple of days in New York City. It was basically like the Irish immigrant population of New York City at that time just kind of went crazy and like ran amuck for, you know, a, a few different reasons. The first of which was that they didn't want to be drafted to fight in the Civil War and like possibly get killed. And they doubly didn't like the fact that under the law at that time, like if you were drafted or conscripted to fight in this civil war, if you were wealthy enough, you could pay somebody to take your spot and you wouldn't have to actually go and fight in the war. You could get some poor person to do it, which is another thing that sounds a lot like, you know, our modern day. And then the other thing that the Irish people were pissed about was they didn't like the black people. You know, like they were just racist. They thought that if the slaves were freed in the southern states, then they were all gonna come up north and they were gonna start taking the jobs that the Irish people wanted for themselves. Which sounds exactly like something you would hear today about this so-called, you know, migrant invasion that they're always talking about on TV. So I'm reading this and I'm like, “God damn, like these foolish Irish immigrants, they're acting a lot like,” you could see these people on TV spouting a lot of this same nonsense. So anyway, this riot that had began as like a protest against the draft or the conscriptions as they called them, devolved quickly into like a race riot where the Irish were, you know, performing all sorts of horrible atrocities against the black people in New York City up to and including burning down an orphanage for black kids, which is like, about as twisted a thing as you could possibly imagine. And I'm reading this book and reading about these atrocities and I'm like, “God damn, like ain't that America for you?” Like here you have, you know, the powers that be have like really divided, like these people that should share, you know, this common interest. And you know, now they don't even have to be bothered to, you know, step on the little people because they're just killing each other cause we've driven them so crazy through the evil machinations of our society. So I'm reading this book and I'm like, “God damn, like I can't believe what they were doing.” The lyrics just pretty much wrote themselves at that point and I just took, you know, images from the book and tried to like present them in such a way. Like, “Ain't this exactly what we're doing nowadays?”

Like, I think this song is pretty cool, but I don't have like quite as much of a tender feeling for it as I do some of the other songs. Cause like it's, it's kind of just like one musical idea in a scene to its conclusion in kind of like a banging sort of like punk rock way, which is cool, but that's all it is. So like, it feels like a little bit of a trifle compared to some of the other more ambitious songs. It's a great thing to, you know, write like a awesome punk banger, but like, you know, to do merely that, it doesn't thrill me as much as some of the other ones nowadays, but it's all right. How ironic, you know, like how often do you come across an album where the most regular, least ambitious song on the record is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb? Typically it's the opposite. You know, you'll listen to a record and they have nine regular songs and then one crazy off the wall, weird one, and usually that's the one you notice. But when you're listening to this second Titus Andronicus album, the normal one seems weird. That's the kind of crazy upside down, topsy-turvy world into which I'm inviting the listener with this record. 

“A Pot in Which to Piss” 

I could see how to, like an outsider, like a band singing about what it's like to be in a band could probably be like a little alienating or maybe like hard to relate to, but it's the life I was living at the time. So I gave myself license to do so. And the song “A Pot in Which to Piss” is just kind of about my experience navigating the music industry during, you know, what we now look at as like the indie rock boom years, you know, and there's this like, this system of, you know, these so-called, indie record labels, certain, you know, online music publications. There's these different sorts of festivals, music conferences, et cetera. And, you know, they're writing books about this time period now. But this was my, that song was like my on the ground reporting on what it was like for me going through that and. Once again, you know, I was a little bit of a house divided amongst itself because on the one hand I was getting what I wanted. Like, I was like kind of a big shot, sort of like in this little world, in this little corner of the music business. Like I was getting to do what I'd hoped, which is, you know, go travel around and do all the concerts and pretty soon we're gonna make another album and that's all great. And I'm running around America with my boys and like, we're partying and getting drunk and high and like doing and rocking the house every night and making a big noise with the amplifiers and that's all great. But at the same time, there was shit about doing it that was just like whack. Like I didn't really think it was that awesome to like go to SXSW and like be like glad handing people or like, you know, sucking up to people, kissing people's ass. Like that's not really my thing.

I didn't like going on the internet and seeing people ragging on me and saying that Titus Andronicus was whack. And this was, you know, in the early days of, you know, internet trolling and stuff. And this is why for the opening spoken part of the song, I had my friend Cassie Ramone, who we remember from the great band Vivian Girls, she reads the opening speech, which is taken from Jefferson Davis's memoir. Jefferson Davis was the president of the so-called Confederate States of America, which was the United States's opponent in the Civil War and Cassie reads, “The audience was large and brilliant, Upon my weary heart were showered flowers, smiles and plaudits, but beyond them, I saw thorns and troubles innumerable.” So that to me, like kind of, you know, not saying Jefferson Davis did the right thing by leading that confederacy, but I could kind of relate in a way to what he was saying. Like, you know, he had been made the president of this fledgling nation and everybody's cheering for him and saying like, “You're the greatest guy, you're about to be like our big hero.” But he knows, like, “This is actually, I'm actually like pretty deep shit now as I embark on this thing that I'm undertaking.” So that was kind of where my head was at. Like, it's awesome that everybody's clapping for me and telling me I'm the man, but at the same time, like, you know, it's like you might have been, you know, better to be a little more careful about what you wish for cause I'm dealing with all this other bullshit. And Cassie Ramone and the Vivian Girls were the, at the time, the recipients of a lot of like really toxic attention on the internet, and particularly in the comments section of a website called Brooklyn Vegan that was very popular at the time. And people in the comments section would say terrible, you know, vicious, misogynistic things about Vivian Girls, you know, which was a fantastic band that like, made a bunch of great songs and records and my friend besides, so like I was pissed off and offended on their behalf and I felt like, Cassie, like I knew and we had talked about it, like she could understand this whole thing of like, you know, we wanted, you know, to pursue the music thing. And in a way our careers were like going great, but at the same time it came with a lot of unwanted stuff that we never asked for.

“A Pot in Which to Piss” is kind of the weird, musically is like kind of the most out there song on the record. Like it goes in a lot of weird directions and takes little unexpected detours in kind of like that sort of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “Paranoid Android,” “Bohemian Rhapsody” kind of way. And the way that happened was that getting towards the end of the writing process for the record, I realized like I've got like maybe five or six like riffs or musical ideas that I like that are kind of homeless right now. They're kind of orphan ideas. So why don't I just put 'em all in the same key of E major and kind of like see what sort of wild madcap journey I can put together for the listener. So that's exactly what I did. So there's kind of like a, you know, a ballady sort of like swirling, like shoegaze kind of part, there's like a kind of more like Clash kind of skronky part, there's like a doo wop like a, you know, Spector like girl group kind of wordless part. There's like a rock and roll, like a boogie woogie part. There's just a lot going on in an album that kind of like makes a point of doing stuff like that and taking these twists and turns. This was sort of like the, you know, the ultimate expression of that kind of idea as far as like a musical idea goes. So it's appropriate then I guess, that it's like right smack in the middle of the record.

So Craig Finn, he was another one of these guys who was nice enough to let me visit him with my little trustee 4-track cassette recorder. And I asked him to read a poem from Walt Whitman, "Vigil Strange on the Field I Kept,” ("Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night") I believe it's called, which is from the perspective of a soldier during the Civil War who I guess, you know, has this, he's like in love with this other guy, this other soldier. And that guy gets killed in battle and he just has this, you know, this moment of burying his lover on the battlefield and it's a very powerful piece of poetry. Craig Finn is like, kind of like a Walt Whitman figure to me, you know, cause he is a New York City guy, I mean, he's from Minneapolis originally, but you know, he's working out of New York and singing about New York stuff. And he has like an incredible faculty for poetry and for using words to, you know, really beautiful ends. But at the same time, he's kind of like a jolly saucy guy, you know, he is like a very gregarious, you know, big hearted sort of person. So, Walt Whitman, you know, is kind of like the Civil War poet. Like, you know, he was not a soldier in it, but he was a nurse. So if you're gonna do a Civil War album and you're gonna have these spoken interludes, Walt Whitman is the guy that you're gonna want to utilize. And Craig Finn is, you know, as was as close to a Walt Whitman as I had in my Rolodex at the time. So he was nice enough to read that. It was backstage at a concert in New Jersey when the first time that Titus Andronicus opened for The Hold Steady and he just banged it out backstage in one or two takes and it's one of, you know, many times over the years that he was there for me when I needed him. And, you know, he's a really, he's a good man and has always kind of looked out for me as sort of like an older guy in the scene that's, you know, trying to do a version of what he did. So big salute to him as well.

“Four Score and Seven” 

Well, this song “Four Score and Seven” wasn't like quite as much of like a super glue job as “Pot in Which to Piss” was, because the two halves of the song, like seem pretty different, I guess. But they were kind of written together, you know, I knew that I wanted to have, you know, go from like kind of a, like a sort of a pretty ballad, with like the piano and the trumpets and stuff and go into like a much more raucous kind of punk thing. But there are a lot of things that unite them, you know, they are in the same key of C major and they always were. They both are, you know, utilizing, what we musicians call the major pentatonic scale, which again is, you know, what a lot of those old Civil War songs are, are based around that scale. The waltz time, it's in a, you know, 6/8 time signature. So it's just kind of like, you know, they're not exact copies of each other, but you know, the two parts share enough in common that I think they make sense together. And it's kind of like, you know, just like a, Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde kind of thing where it's talking about the same concept, but you know, doing a more like plaintiff version of it at the beginning and then a more like amped up, assertive, aggressive, like angrier version of it at the end. “Four Score and Seven” was another song that much like “A More Perfect Union” that I wrote in the car. And I can remember very vividly pulling over to jot down, you know, the lyrics of the faster section, which is the second half of it on a back of like, I guess probably like a 12 pack of beer. It was definitely written on cardboard of some kind or maybe like a box of saltine crackers or something like whatever kind of cardboard, maybe pizza box, something like that. But it was definitely a sharpie on cardboard job that I did on that one. But it was just the product of, you know, more and more of those long drives and just thinking about this whole thing of what we now call tribalism, this need, people seem to have to search for conflict as a means of, defining and aligning themselves and giving themselves purpose. For whatever reason, like people seem, you know, more secure when they're acting in opposition to something, or when they're engaged in some kind of conflict, they seem to feel like their lives are more fulfilling or have more purpose. And it does really kind of, doesn't matter what the conflict is, it's just like they seem to want to run towards that state of just being in conflict against what,  it could be anything, and this has, you know, repeated itself throughout history. And that's why I say at the opening of the song, you know, “This is a war we can't win after 10,000 years, it's still us against them.” Us against them is not really like a very useful descriptor for a meaningful conflict, but it seems to be like more than good enough for most people. People live their, you know, seem to like live their life and adopt these sorts of positions and these ideologies just like they're rooting for their favorite sports team, the Democrats, the Republicans, you know, like we don't have to get into a whole big thing about it. But it just seems to me, or it seemed to me at the time that if this us versus them mentality is like the main thing that's guiding us and informing like all the decisions that we're making as individuals and as a society, then we're actually never going to really make any progress, which would make it, you know, the war we can't win like I sang about. And, you know, the whole history of human civilization apparently for some people doesn't provide enough evidence that you know, this bickering and this whole, you know, fuck you attitude that people have and that they cherish so much in place of actually like, believing in something or trying to actually achieve something constructive. Our whole human history has not been sufficient to convince these people that maybe we need to think differently about how we're going to work together to achieve a more perfect union, for lack of a better term.

I will say America is a great idea, America is the best idea. Anybody ever had this notion of a place and a society where everyone is equal, where everyone is entitled to the same rights, these rights that cannot be given or taken away by any earthly force, these rights that are endowed onto us by God, for lack of a better term. You know the idea of a place where if you work hard and you're honest and you do the right thing, that you are rewarded. That's great. A place where there are no limits to how high you can climb if you're willing to do the work is a great idea. The idea that everybody's opinion is worth the same, that everybody gets the same vote, that everybody gets the same chance to succeed is a great idea. Obviously, that's not the real world, that place has never existed. People love to say, “Oh, like the so-called founding fathers were like so full of shit. Like they didn't think that everyone was created equal, they literally owned slaves.” And like of course they were full of shit. But that doesn't mean that they didn't let an important genie out of the bottle when they wrote those beautiful words that they didn't actually mean, they put an idea out into the world that I think is important. And people nowadays and people throughout history have wanted to, you know, throw out the baby with the bath water and say like, “America is such like a fucked up place. And like the American government does so much evil at home and around the world.” And of course that's all true. But that doesn't mean that the idea of America is not important. The idea of America is both important and beautiful and it's worth fighting for in whatever, you know, shape that takes it's worth preserving and it's worth trying to actualize the promise of America. And you know, a lot of people will tell you that, you know, “We're further away from fulfilling that promise than we've ever been.” And that may be so, but the promise remains. The idea is out there, the genie is out of the bottle. If you just give up and you say, “Okay, well you know, you people on the other side, you wanna, you know, wave the American flag around and say that you represent the real America, whatever that even means. Then you can have it, you can take the flag cause I don't even want it and I don't like America.” I do not share that defeatist attitude. I believe in the America that was promised in our Declaration of Independence, even if it never existed and maybe never will exist. I care about it. It's important to me and it belongs to me. It doesn't belong to, you know, these people that try and turn it into something ugly and hateful. It should belong to the people that want it to be what it is, which is something inclusive and beautiful and belongs to everybody. I like that. That's where I'm at with America. 

Well, Kevin McMahon definitely outdid himself on that song on “Four Score and Seven,” and like, one of the most vivid memories of that whole time in the studio was, you know, we recorded the backing track as like a regular rock band. And Eric was just back there playing his regular drum set. And then Kevin was like, you know, “You're all into this like military drum beat thing, why don't I go ahead and let's get a couple other drums and we'll have Eric like, overdub some more like snares and tom toms and stuff on this one big important dramatic part.” And we were like, “Alright, Kevin, you're the boss.” And so we did it and then we came in the control room and Kevin, you know, turned his knobs and like the sound that came out of the speakers just like blew everybody's heads off. And we were like, “Holy shit. Like, that is the craziest sounding thing.” It was one of those moments where we were like, “Damn, like, we're kind of like, something's happening here. Like, we're onto something.” 

So many times that Kevin, you know, came through with, you know, either like, an idea or, you know, just like executing an idea that we had, like with the technological knowhow and the finesse to actually take like a goofy off the wall thing that we wanted to do and like actually manifested in the real world in a way that like, you know, would make sense to the listener and be like, really pleasing and sonically exciting. So hell of a producer, that guy in a lot of ways, he was the engineer of, you know, the first decade plus of all the Titus Andronicus recordings. He recorded and produced our first CD-R EP when the band was only like, you know, three or four months old. He recorded our first and second 7-inches, and he recorded and produced the first Titus Andronicus album, The Airing of Grievances. And even though we had received at the time what seemed like a lot of money as an advance from our then label Troubleman Unlimited, it was about, you know, $2,500 that seemed like an unspendable, like infinite amount of money, but naturally we ran through it pretty fast. But Kevin McMahon, you know, really believed in us and wanted us to, you know, have the best possible debut record that we could. So he cut us a lot of breaks and he let us pay him in like, you know, amplifiers and effect pedals that were like mostly broken and he cut us a lot of slack. So it was only natural and I couldn't have been more thrilled when we had this deal with XL. I basically took that entire advance and I just, you know, plopped it down in front of him and I said, you know, “This money is yours now and how many days in a row is that gonna get me in this studio of yours?” And I guess it ended up getting me about like, you know, almost 30 days.

“Theme from Cheers” 

Well, if you want to understand this record, The Monitor and this Titus Andronicus band in general, you have to know about a band called Spider Bags who were and are a band from North Carolina, led by a fellow named Dan McGee, who is just one of the greatest guys that I ever knew and has been like such an enormous inspiration for me. I, over my whole career, the song “Theme from Cheers” was very much a conscious and deliberate attempt to write a song in the style of Spider Bags. And if you listen to that first Spider Bags album, A Celebration of Hunger, you'll see like, you know, all this stuff from the “Themes of Cheers,” you know, is just Frankensteined together from different songs from that first Spider Bags album. You know, if I take the drumbeat from one song and put the chords from another song on top of it, and Spider Bags, you know, sang a lot about drinking. I was having my own, you know, feelings about alcohol and substance usage in general at that time. And the fact that, you know, I am often trying to numb myself to the reality of my life, to dull the pain of being alive. Not unlike on “No Future Part Three” with the Lexapro stuff, but this time it was using alcohol to do it. Spider Bags offers me like the perfect musical jumping off point to discuss these things.

Spider Bags’ style was like a little bit more country leaning, but still like very much rocking and had really like a punk mentality and a punk energy, but utilized more like, you know, classic kind of American song forms. You know, they would get compared like a lot to Silver Jews at the time, but they were like far more rocking, like hard rocking than Silver Jews. But Dan had kind of like a deep voice, sort of like David Berman had, and they had like a lot of incredible things going on in the lyrics. His perspective on life and the poetics that he would use to articulate it. And like how just really like strong and sturdy these songs he was writing were just like one classic after another, like songs that seemed like they would've just been around forever. And so it was like huge, huge for us. And so when Spider bags came and played in New York City, we were able to convince them to come and uh, and do an afternoon concert in Ian Graetzer’s garage, which was where we practiced. And like all the kids from, you know, Glen Rock came out to this matinee concert and were just like 30 youngsters in the garage watching Spider Bags and all the guys in Titus Andronicus being like, “This is it. Like, these guys are as good as it gets. Like, this is so awesome.” This, all of this, you know, culminated beautifully for me when Dan McGee of Spider Bags, that incredible guy I admire so much. you know, he actually made the long drive all the way from North Carolina to New Paltz and, and sang the song as a duet with me. I don't think he'd ever even heard the song before, but he came up and we listened to it a few times and I wrote out the lyrics for him and, you know, and like four or five tries or something, he just banged it out and gave that beautiful performance and really gave me, you know, that authentic Spider Bag sound that I was so desperately trying to emulate.

I could have probably been forgiven for just keeping that song more regular, especially since the lyrics talk about, you know, being kind of like a lazy bum and a drunkard. But I guess I just couldn't help myself and I had to do another like “Paranoid Android”-type thing where I was like, “Well, I've got, you know, two more riffs or song ideas that are also in G Major and I can put, you know, drinking lyrics on top of those as well. So why don't I just go for it?” And that's what I did cause I was just incorrigible back then. Like, I just didn't, I don't know, I just couldn't stop writing the songs until there was nothing, you know, there was no more road left in front of me. Could be accused of, you know, overwriting some of them perhaps, but I think that the “Theme from Cheers” one turned out pretty okay, all things considered.

"To Old Friends and New"

Well, believe it or not, “To Old Friends and New” is actually the first song that I wrote on that album, and I didn't write it for the album. It was a very old song. Even then, like that song was on our original five song CD-R EP that we recorded in 2005 that we would sell at the shows. The last track on that EP was me doing like a solo piano version of that song, “To Old Friends and New.” And when we were gonna do the first album, The Airing of Grievances, there was a notion that we were going to do like a full, like, rock band arrangement of the song. But then when we actually sat down and said, “Okay, these are the 10 songs that we got,” the track list was gonna be too long and it wasn't gonna fit on one 12-inch vinyl record. And Mike Simonetti of Troubleman Unlimited was clear like, you know, “This has to be one 12-inch. Like, we're not doing a double album for this so you can have, you know, 52 minutes instead of, you know, 45 or whatever.” So we were like, I guess we're gonna cut one song and “To Old Friends and New,” like, we already kind of had a ballad on the album already with “No Future Part One.” And the rock band arrangement of “To Old Friends and New” was not really like, quite up to snuff anyway, so we're like, “One of these ballads has gotta go.” And so it was “To Old Friends and New” that ended up getting left on the, on the cutting room floor. And we never even actually attempted to record it for the first album. But, you know, going into the second one, I think it ended up being a blessing because thematically like it fits much better with what's going on on The Monitor. And indeed it kind of becomes, you know, it's sort of like the emotional centerpiece of the entire thing.

Sometimes that's how it is, you know, here's another tip for artists, like if you're doing your second album or you know, your fifth or sixth or whatever, you're trying to start writing a new record, one good place to start is look at whatever songs you have just lying around that haven't been on a record yet. And as you're cataloging them, these leftovers of these loose songs that you've got, maybe, you know, take a look and see if there's any themes or motifs or ideas that are unifying those songs and you could potentially use that, like to guide you towards, creating however many other songs you need for the record. So that's a little bit what happened here, you know, “To Old Friends and New” is very much a song about conflict and people with a common interest that find themselves, you know, at odds. And I, you know, hmm, how can I put this diplomatically? It really gets my goat a lot of the time when people reduce the monitor to being a so-called breakup album because indeed it does address the dissolution of the romantic relationship I had that made me move up to Boston in the first place. But the song that people point to as evidence for this being a so-called breakup album. That's the only song that has any romantic content whatsoever. The other nine songs don't allude to any sort of romance. And in the opening track, when I say I'm moving up to Boston, I don't say like, “I'm moving up there cause I'm in love, or I'm want to, you know, I gotta go see about a girl,” like Good Will Hunting. Like that's not, it never says that, but people get, hung up, they get stuck on this “To Old Friends and New” song and they say, “Oh well this is, you know, this smoking gun that proves the entire point of this album is crying over some failed romance.” And I think that's unfairly reductive. Because like I said, you know, the meat of the album is these six like vignettes that all take their own little look at, these conflicts that we have, you know, within our society, within our interpersonal relationships, within our own selves and the different, you know, parts of our own psyche. And so the conflicts that inevitably arise within any romantic relationship, you know, that would be certainly something to talk about if you're making an album about these different sorts of conflicts. So that's what I did with this one, but the fact that it's the only song on the record that talks about anything to do with romance and it was already five years old when the record came out, I think people are a little misguided in that. 

Another big thing that was going on in the early days of like the Titus Andronicus professional touring career is that, you know, in our travels we would come across some like-minded musicians about, you know, kind of our same age or at sort of the same stage of their careers. And lots of times we would be fortunate enough to become buddies with them. And one great example of that was the band Wye Oak who were, you know, fantastic, at the time two piece band of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack. Anybody would be well advised to go and check out any of their records cause they're all really cool and all pretty different. But at the time, Wye Oak was just like us, they were, you know, some scrappy kids that were trying to make a go of it. And we played with them a bunch of times in a bunch of different cities, just by chance, they were living in Baltimore at the time. So we played with 'em a bunch and got to be friendly with them. And of course, you know, all you need is two ears and a heart to see that like they were tremendously talented. When I found that I had this, kind of like, sort of romantic ballad to do, I was like, “Maybe I can get somebody to sing this as a duet with me,” even though it wasn't originally written as a duet. “But if I make it a duet, maybe that will kind of reinforce this thing that I'm going for.” There's two sides to every story, and our narrator of The Monitor album is, you know, quite the finger pointing, uptight kind of high horse guy. So maybe if we're gonna let, open the window and let a little light in on this song and start to be a little more compassionate and merciful towards, you know, the so-called other that's on the opposite end of some of these conflicts we're exploring, maybe doing it as a duet could go a long way towards achieving that. And so then it was like, “Okay, well who's my friend with the most beautiful voice? Oh, well Jenn Wasner, of course.” So she was nice enough to agree to do it. We took a little band field trip down to Baltimore and not only did she sing the second verse beautifully, she was like, “I'll do some harmonies on the bridge as well.” And I was like, “great.” So that was, you know, she sang that just as beautifully as verse and then I was like, “Hey, you know, as long as you're here, like why don't you just fucking do the guitar solo as well?” Cause she's also great at that. So she kind of like came in and pretty much like took over that song, which I was, couldn't have been more thrilled about cause she had some ideas that she executed fantastically and, you know, brought this whole other character and this whole other different musical skillset to the record. So she'll always have a special place in my heart for that and I’ll always owe her a big debt of gratitude.

One thing to know about me is that my all time favorite musician songwriter, rockstar is Lou Reed. And I think, you know, there's so many great things about him, but the most amazing thing that he did across his career was he turned a really compassionate gaze towards people that were really marginalized by society, people that were subject to serious degradation, you know, transgender people, junkies, not to conflate the two, but like, you know, people that in the 1960s and seventies were really looked down upon. Lou had like a lot of sympathy and compassion for them and he turned that into many beautiful songs. And, you know, once again, I just happened to have the guitar here and he had a song, there was a song that Lou wrote for the second Velvet Underground album that they ended up not using that appeared on the Peel Slowly and See box set. It went something like, (sings) “I don't care about your present pay and the nightlife, you keep burning. I don't care what your old man says in the ways you have of learning. It's all right the way that you live. It's all right the way that you live.” And so I heard that and I was like, “That sounds nice.” So I just went, (sings) “It's alright, the way that you live, it's alright the way that you live.” I basically took the same, same words, same chords, changed the time signature, (sings) “It's all right the way that you live. It's all right the way that you live.” Just kind of, you know, if you're gonna steal, you should steal from the best. So Lou helped me out with that one. I'm sure he wouldn't mind, may he rest in peace. And from there I just kinda gave myself the task of, you know, being as compassionate towards my subject as he was to his, which is basically this romantic partner that I have, or kind of on the rocks a little bit. But I want, I'm trying to recognize like, you know, “Even though you are being pretty fucking annoying and like getting on my nerves and making my life difficult right now, I recognize that I'm probably being pretty fucking annoying and making your life pretty difficult. But I think I'm doing my best and I need to extend you the same compassion and offer you the same grace that I would wish for myself.” For the most part, like people, you know, generally mean pretty well. And you gotta, you gotta just try and cut people some slack.

“...And Ever”

If “Titus Andronicus Forever” was like the opening credits to our little show, which was like the six little vignettes, then you know, when we've reached the end of that, then we have ellipses “And Ever,” you know, “Titus Andronicus Forever and ever,” you know, which is kind of like wrapping things up and then trying to like tie a little bow around everything and create like this symmetrical structure for our album and our little story. You'll notice the lyrics are pretty similar, but dissimilar in one important way. Cause on the original one, “Titus Andronicus Forever” says, “The enemy's everywhere. But nobody seems to be worried or care that the enemy is everywhere.” So that's that kind of outward looking, finger pointing mentality that our narrator has as he embarks upon this journey. When we get to the end and it's the reprise, the lyric now is, “The enemy's everywhere. I'm worthless and weak, I'm sick and I'm scared, and the enemy is everywhere.” So it is an inward looking, it is a self-critical reflection of the same statement and the same sentiment. And that is kind of, you know, starting to hint at what you know, the moral of the story was all along. If the enemy is everywhere, that means the enemy is also within. And beautiful harmony vocals by Kevin McMahon on this track, by the way. You know, his big singing moment on the record, he sets me up with like the sorts of harmonies that like Keith Richards would've done for Mick Jagger on those great old Stones records. So that was a big surprise cause he did that when we weren't around and he claimed that he had gotten a special guest to come do it, that he wouldn't say who it was. And then he played it for us a couple of times and we were like, “Wait a second, this is you singing?” And he was like, “I don't know, I don't know who it is.”

“The Battle of Hampton Roads” 

“The Battle of Hampton Roads” is actually the only song on the record that actually addresses the title of the record. You know, because the Monitor was a ship that was built by the United States. It was the first battleship to be made completely out of iron, which made it like a lot less vulnerable to cannon fire. And they needed to do it and fast because the Confederacy had already built an ironclad warship, which was called the Merrimack. And what they had done was they had taken a regular wooden battleship and just grafted iron plates onto the exterior of it. But even that was enough that the Merrimack was, you know, the scourge of the seas at that time. And completely, you know, ran through the whole United States Navy. So the US or the Union, as they were sometimes called then, had to go out and build this fully iron battleship. And there's a great book about this called The Dual of the Ironclads. And this was another thing that I learned about in the first episode or two of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary that had me completely flabbergasted like that I'd never heard of this before, like this amazing moment in naval history, learning about these, you know, these ships. And this battle, this Battle of Hampton Roads when the Monitor and the Merrimack finally went head to head was just like so incredible to me. And that was, you know, watching that and learning about that in the movie and reading the book made it pretty clear to me, “This is like the image. Like, this is what I'm gonna use. This is gonna be like the album title. This is gonna be my main, this is going to be like the metaphor that's going to like tie this whole thing together.”

This famous Battle of Hampton Roads ultimately ended in a stalemate because neither ship could sink the other. You know, they were each too powerful, they were too evenly matched. So, you know, they fired at each other like a bunch, like for hours and hours and hours to no avail. And ultimately they each just, you know, retreated having to recognize the futility of this battle that they were engaged in, that neither side was going to be able to claim a decisive victory. And that, to me, like was an apt metaphor for so many of the conflicts that I was already writing about. And trying to, you know, report on. In my songs, so many of these conflicts that were just never really going to amount to anything constructive that were never going to be decided in any kind of like sound definitive manner. And of course, if you wanted, you could look at it and say that, you know, “these two ships are me and the girlfriend that I couldn't work it out with.” That would probably be a fair interpretation of that lyric. But again, I don't think it's exclusively that. I think that's one way to interpret it if you're so inclined, if you're really hung up on this breakup album concept. But it just was, to me it was, you know, the perfect metaphor to kind of speak about the futility of these conflicts.

This song was written with like the express intent of being like the grand finale, like lyrically it was going to tie everything up. It was the epilogue of this whole story where I was gonna kind of summarize everything that I'd been through, and I was going to present my conclusions and share what it was that I had learned, or you know, the narrator, whoever you wanna call him. So that was part of my purpose. But at the same time, I do still have this crazy dream that I'm making the greatest rock album of the century so far, and I want it to be like an earth-shaking event for the listener. So I'm like, “Well, this is the end of the story. This is the time. Like to really go for it. Let's really swing for the fences. We're gonna leave nothing on the table. We're gonna pull out all the stops. We're gonna use every trick in the book. We're gonna put on all the cheat codes.” When you go and you pull the bagpipes out, then you're playing with the cheat codes on like, and we're like, “We're gonna harmonize the guitars. We're gonna do everything we can possibly think of. And just blow it up into this like gargantuan, like larger than life epic,” in the way that, you know, Springsteen had done on, “Jungleland” for the Born to Run album, just to name one example, but more than that, like bigger than that was the goal. And just to take the listener on this journey from where at the beginning it's just me and the guitar and I'm doing like a Billy Bragg-type thing with just like a regular like little lonely singer songwriter vibe. And then, you know, then we get, the kick drum’s coming in and like, you know, things are ramping up and then it's like, “Well now let's do a whole drum beat with the kick drum and the snare, and now the bass is going.” And little by little just adding and adding all these things and just, you know, building up to this fit of ecstasy because this is, what else are you supposed to do if you're trying to make the greatest album of the century? Like this is, you know, this is just how it's done. You better have like some kind of grand finale so that was what we attempted to do.

It is kind of like an exact mirror image of the opening track, “More Perfect Union” where I'm leaving New Jersey and I'm going to Boston with a lot of hope and a lot of optimism and ambition. And then here on the closing track, you know, the reflection we see that I am returning to New Jersey, leaving Boston and feeling, you know, kind of defeated having been through like kind of a sobering experience and having, you know, like a different sort of perspective on the, all those themes that we'd just been talking about. But ultimately realizing that, in all the conflicts in which I was engaged, I was a more than willing participant. And everything that I had accused my opponents of, I too was guilty of those same things, which I guess is like kind of the moral of this story. That's why, you know, at the end of the song I say, “My enemy, it's your name on my lips as I go to sleep. And I know what little I've known of peace. I've done to you, what you've done to me, and I'd be nothing without you, my darling, please don't ever leave.” With that long verse at the end of the song about how “I'm gonna smoke cigarettes, I'm gonna drink, I'm gonna run around the country screaming my head off, I'm gonna do all this stuff. Like I ain't backing down, I'm doubling down on all those things.” It's kind of like, you know, similar I guess to the last verse of Bob Dylan, “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” where he says, you know, how he's going back out, “where black is the color, none is the number,” and this kind of thing, you know, like “I am bloodied and bruised and like defeated in a way, but I'm still at it. You know, I ain't really changed, but I've learned a few things. If nothing else, I am recognizing my own complicity in the structures around me, and I'm starting to take a little bit more accountability and open myself to the possibility that maybe I am not completely blameless for my own misery, like I might be the architect of my unhappiness to a certain degree.” Maybe that's one just a tiny step towards, you know, thinking a little more critically and just going about your life with a little bit more intention and not just kind of blindly casting about and doing things without really thinking of them. 

Like a few years after this record came out, um, this guy named Gabe, who is a student at Occidental College in California, sent me this term paper that he wrote about the album, where he did like a really incredible job of explaining it, like better than I possibly could and better than I've done on this podcast so far. But Gabe basically explained how like, you know, after we come to this conclusion about how I, the narrator, have been playing the same rotten games that my so-called enemies have, and I too am guilty of othering them and trying to cast them as the cause of all my problems. That's kind of like a sad thing to realize or that could be like a moment of like guilt or shame for the narrator, you know, recognizing his complicity, but the music doesn't reflect that. It doesn't sound ashamed. It sounds less ashamed than ever. It sounds more shameless than ever because that's when we get the bagpipes and we get the harmonized guitars and every, the whole kitchen sink arrangement.So I guess the point of all that was to say like, “Okay, we've gone through this whole kind of disheartening, disenfranchising, sobering experience and learned to recognize our own complicity in these systems, but at least we learned something and like we've had like an epiphany, things are clearer than they were before. Whether or not we choose to take it, there may now be illuminated a path forward where we could hopefully grow as a person and become, you know, kinder and more compassionate.” If you look at it from a certain angle, that would potentially be something to celebrate and that could be a joyous moment at the same time as it is kind of a moment of sadness and shame. As far as the literary angle of it, that maybe is why the ending is so grandiose and ecstatic, even when the conclusion is maybe, you know, not quite so joyous. 

As soon as we got done recording it, we went right back out and started doing the concerts again. Like we went right from the studio to the airport to go over to England and play the Reading Festival. And then from there, you know, we came back home and went straight out on the road and toured around the whole USA for like, you know, 40 days or so. And so we weren't even hardly around very much like when it was getting mixed. Kevin McMahon just did all the mixes while we were out on the road and he would, you know, email them to us and we would check 'em out and, you know, approve them or give tiny little notes here and there. So it wasn't, there wasn't even like much time to stop and like, think about the job that we'd done cause we were right back on the treadmill and right back on the old grind out there doing the gigs. And, you know, listening to these mixes, like listening to these songs that you spent so long on, but you're playing them on the headphones, like off the iPhone or whatever in a parking lot, or like an alleyway behind a rock club. It's not like, you don't really, it's not the most conducive environment for thinking like, “Holy shit. Like, I'm such a genius. Like, I can't believe that this masterpiece that I've made.” But I felt pretty satisfied that we'd definitely given it everything we got. That's all that I could really ask. You know, because like even by like the end of the tour that we did while Kevin was mixing the album, like I can remember the last show in New York City at the old Brooklyn location of the Knitting Factory, like getting done with the concert and looking out and there's like, you know, “Oh shit, there's only like a hundred people here. Like, you know, a year ago it would've been like two or three hundred. Like this project is maybe like running out of steam.” So maybe it's a good thing that we didn't leave anything on the table when we made the second record. Cause the way things are going, there probably won't be a third one. So maybe it's not too late for me to go back to graduate school or something. It's not gonna keep me up at night in the future wondering like, “Oh, if only I'd, you know, taken a little bit of a bigger swing. Or if only I'd, you know, hadn't been so cowardly to like, you know, follow through on my biggest, most grandiose ideas.” I was open to the idea that that was what The Monitor was gonna be good for was just helping me to not live with a certain type of regret. But then in January of 2010, somehow it got on the internet, like it leaked. That was a thing that used to happen in those days. Records would leak ahead of schedule and I don't know why, but people started sharing it a lot on, you know, Napster and Soulseek and stuff. And it started like picking up a lot of steam. And next thing you knew, like when it came time to do the record release show at New York's, Bowery Ballroom, all of a sudden, you know, we're playing for an audience of 600 people and they all know the words to the record that came out that day. And so I was like, “Oh shit. Like the train might be leaving the station again.” And so, you know, my little crazy adventure got, you know, a couple years added on. 

When it came out, it got like a lot of, uh, you know, pretty good reviews. And they started to like put us in like the magazines and stuff. Like we had our picture in like Rolling Stone and Spin Magazine. Like I can remember, you know, my stepmother, she got the issue of Spin Magazine that we were in that had our little picture in it. And she was like, “I remember when you were a kid, you used to read this magazine every month, and now you're in it.” Like, she had like tears in her eyes, she was so proud. So that was nice. And then we, you know, started again, all these like different opportunities like pretty soon we were fucking on TV, like, you know, on the Jimmy Fallon show. When I tell people about it now, I just say that we were on Jimmy Fallon. I don't tell them that we were on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” which started at 12:30 AM, I let them believe that we were on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, that starts at 11:30 PM But you know, we're out, playing at Coachella and we're opening for Okkervil River on for like a month on tour, who were like a really big deal for me in college. We're opening up for Bright Eyes, opening up for the Pogues, like doing all these things, and playing to like big audiences, like all over the world. And it was cool, you know, like it is a topic for another podcast perhaps, but it didn't actually fix everything for me. If anything, you know, it probably exacerbated some of my problems that kind of came to a head and I had to deal with them in a way that wasn't like, completely pleasant a couple years later. As far as like what I think about it now, like I don't really think about it, unless somebody asks me about it like you've done to have me on this nice podcast. I think of it as one of my assets in the sense of like an asset. Like, you know, the thing when you go to the bank and ask for a mortgage to buy a house or something, they ask you like, “What are your assets?” And you know, my biggest asset is that I'm the guy that wrote The Monitor, the second Titan Andronicus album. That doesn't get you very far in any bank. But it's the thing that enables me to, you know, if I want to go out and do a concert, like that's the biggest thing that's gonna help me sell the ticket for it, or to help me sell the t-shirt to the person once they bought the ticket and now they're in the building. And I also, you know, I'm the steward of it as well, you know, it's like, it's something that needs to be protected. It's like a plant that needs to be watered once in a while. So if somebody asks me like, “Will you come on this podcast and talk about it?” I'm willing to do that because first of all, it's nice of you to think of me. And secondly, I want to keep the legacy, you know, well nourished and nurtured. When I look back on my life as an artist and I think about like what I really have, that's a value. You know, I have something that no one can buy. I look back on my life and my travels, and I know that in every city in America and in every tiny little small town that I've been to, you know, a stranger has come up to me like damn near with tears in their eyes and like falling into my arms and like, just can't tell me fast or loudly enough, like how important the music that I've produced has been to them and how it's, you know, changed their lives for the better, saved their lives, some of them off and say, and you know, that's priceless. So if the album has done anything for me, it's given me that.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about Titus Andronicus. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase The Monitor. Instrumental music is the song “The Anniversaries” by The Tisburys. Thanks for listening. 

Credits:

“A More Perfect Union”

“Titus Andronicus Forever” 

“No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future”

“Richard II”

“A Pot in Which to Piss”

“Four Score and Seven”

“Theme from Cheers”

“To Old Friends and New”

“...And Ever”

“The Battle of Hampton Roads”

℗ & © 2010 XL Recordings

All songs written by Titus Andronicus

Produced, recorded and mixed by Kevin McMahon at Marcata Recording, New Paltz, New York

Additional recording by Kevin McMahon and Elio DeLuca at the Soul Shop, Medford, Massachusetts

Even more additional recording by Kevin McMahon and Andy Stack at the Wong residence, Baltimore, Maryland

Incidental four-track recording and tape op by Patrick Stickles

Craig Finn’s monologue recorded by Dustin Miller

Mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound, New York City

David Bentley – cello

Liam Betson – guitar, vocals

Brett Bondar – Highland bagpipes, Scottish small pipes

Peter Buettner – tenor saxophone

Andrew Cedermark – guitar

Elio DeLuca – piano, electric piano, organ, vocals

Ian Dykstra – tambourine, sleigh bells, marching bass drum 

Pete Feigenbaum – guitar

Greg Farley – fiddle

Ian Graetzer – bass guitar

Eric Harm – drums, percussion, vocals

Dean Jones – trombone

Dan McGee – vocals

Kevin McMahon – guitar, percussion, vocals

Matt Miller – vocals

Ian O'Neil – guitar, vocals

Brian Rutledge – trumpet

Brendan Stickles – vocals

Patrick Stickles – lead vocals, guitar, synthesizer, piano, electronics, harmonica

Alex Tretiak – snare drums, vocals

Julian Veronesi – vocals

Ryan Walsh – vocals

Jenn Wasner – guitar, vocals

Dustin Wong – guitar

The Monitor Players:

Okey Canfield Chenoweth III as Abraham Lincoln

Craig Finn as Walt Whitman

Cassie Ramone as Jefferson Davis

Nolen Strals as William Lloyd Garrison

Episode Credits: 

Intro/Outro Music:

“The Anniversaries” by The Tisburys, from the album, A Still Life Revisited

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam