Enoch 18:14^[1][2][3]

Lyrics

Banter

• This is a song - you find out a thing happens, you can't bury your references anymore in the age of the internet, people will just take the phrase that sounds weird and plug it into Google, and find out what it is in seconds. I am hoping to one day run across a text so obscure that it is indexed nowhere, and then steal the entire thing and make it the song. But until that day comes, I have to come clean about choruses that I lifted from places, and this is from a video game called Odin's Sphere. [Audience cheering] Oh man, I feel bad for people clapping for Odin's Sphere, that game is torture. You go, oh, I was supposed to pay my taxes today, but instead I spent 9 hours playing Odin's Sphere. Did you get out of hell after they turned you into a rabbit? No. I didn't. But I did pull up plenty of the fruits that grow in hell secretly that you can get if you know where they're located, because you recognize the little popping things that come up when the fruit's underneath the soil in hell are...at? So the thing about Odin's Sphere is that there are long cut scenes. It's a Japanese game, and the cut scenes are like, 10 minutes long. And the first couple times you come to one, you think, cut scene, you are too long. But the game is not going to hurry along for you, and so you get accustomed to it. And then the thing happens that was supposed to happen, which is you become emotionally involved. With a plotline that's not incoherent, but too complicated to follow. It's like two Russian novels stacked one on top of the other. And but these people occasionally deliver these lines with such - uh - a wound in their voice, you know, I had it programmed so I would hear it in Japanese and read the subtitles on the screen. And the chorus of this song is one moment where a person who's got fumes rising from them - that means they live in hell - reminds a couple of people that their condition in life is a little different from hers. (2009-12-01 Webster Hall)
• So this song takes its chorus from a video came called Odin Sphere. [cheering] I always want to call it Odin Quest. It's not called Odin Quest. If they make a game called Odin Quest, I will just never get things straight again. In Odin Sphere there's often the stuff that I like to imagine has something to do with Japanese mythology which if you've seen some Ike movies you know, Japanese mythology is a whole world that we know nothing about in the US - like, suddenly something will happen and you'll go, wow, it seems like I'm supposed to understand this but it's very bizarre. And this whole game is, y'know, your character is bouncing along collecting sprites and so on and so forth, and then you wake up and you're a rabbit in Hell. [laughter] Now. This has happened to me a time or two, so I knew that this was a game for me. I was like, oh, wow, they made one for those of us who sometimes woke up as rabbits in the underworld. Kick-ass. I appreciate them thinking of us. But then, in your rabbit form, you run across some people who get very upset with - I think it's actually a parable about privilege, but I'm not entirely sure - but at any rate, a person suffering from a curse runs across one not so cursed, and the uncursed ones have some choice words - no, the cursed ones have some choice words for those who don't get it. [?] (2013-06-14 - Taft Theatre Ballroom, Cincinnati)
• Then there'll be these cut scenes, these very long cut scenes with these story arcs, that again, I -- I know there's people who follow them really well and can repeat them, but to me they seem like they're coming from somebody else's family story, you know. Like if you meet somebody and they go 'God, you know how my mom is?' and you go, no, we haven't met. And it's like that, right, and at one point a very well-dressed person with silvery purple hair says the chorus of this song, says to two people who are just sort of standing there: 'You and your brother, you escaped the curse. You can't understand what it's like.' And I thought, oh, man, I relate to that on a very basic human level, right [laughs]. So I wrote this song. (2021-09-23")
• [JD plays some piano chords, band leaves] I was playing a video game [cheering]. I love my job because, at most people's jobs, at most jobs I've worked, if I say, hey, I was playing a video game, I'd be standing there, before my shift at Beloit, a children's home I worked at, and if I show up at 6:45 and say, hey, guess what, I was playing the third Super Mario Brothers one, the one where, where it really feels like someone involved was taking drugs. The one that opens with people floating through space. And you pull up radishes to get hearts. Just like in real life. [laughter] But this was later, this was a game, it's what - once I start talking, if you needed to have a cigarette or something, you could go and come back, and I'd still not have come to my point. Some Japanese video games have very long plot setup segments, much longer than what I'm going to do here. It's page after page of dialogue screens, impossibly complex lore, you [woo!] - somebody who plays a lot of games like [piano stops] he talked about the lore. [cheering, laughter]I knew I had a friend in the lore. [piano resumes] Some of these dialogue screens get very emotional, especially if you happen to be an emotional person, especially if you happen to be at a certain place in your life. Where the reason you're playing video games 4 or 5 hours a day is to shut out the other stuff. [woo] This is a song that I did not put on The Life of the World To Come, but was written during that time, which was an extraordinarily hard time for me. (2023-10-07 Ace of Spades)

Live Performances

• 2009-12-01 Webster Hall
• 2013-06-14 - Taft Theatre Ballroom, Cincinnati (JD and Peter duo - recording)
• 2023-10-07 Ace of Spades (JD solo)

Footnotes