Half Dead

Lyrics

Banter

• JD: This song wasn't supposed to be there, but it was, like, sort of waiting for its chance.
  Peter: It was the hidden track.
  JD: It was the hidden track, but you didn't have to wait an extra twenty minutes to hear it. This is a song about a morning that you are gonna have. You'll remember me when that morning comes. You'll say, 'Fuck that guy. He told me this shit was coming, and here it is. This really sucks. I hate it, and I hate knowing that he was right.' But I will take a sort of cynical satisfaction in your pain. (2006-09-30)
• This is a song whose explanation is really simple, which I like because sometimes I try to explain to people what the songs are about, and it's like, 'It's not really like anything in my experience, John, so I don't really know what you're talking about.' I say, 'Well, I didn't write it for you anyway!' But this one, I don't suppose there's anybody among us who hasn't at some point been going through their stuff, cleaning the room or looking for something, run across an old student ID of somebody you hadn't seen in a long, long time and you say to yourself, 'Well, I probably shouldn't keep that, what if my wife runs across it?' 'Why do you have that?' 'Well, I don't know, I wasn't saving it, I just didn't know I had it still.' 'Well, why didn't you throw it away?' Well, I didn't, I mean, there's no reason to really throw it away.' 'Well, why are you keeping it?' 'I'm not keeping it, I just didn't really know it was around.' That sort of thing. Except subtract the wife and add a lot of emptiness in the spaces around the house: in the fireplace, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in all the corners of the bedroom — it's remarkable the amount of emptiness you can fit into one of those — and try emptying the house of the presence of a person who was once there and will not be there again, and this is called Half Dead. (2007-01-02)
• So, these aren't the same people [as in How to Embrace a Swamp Creature], but they could be. You know, you think about that sort of relationship where you did the visit back to the house a couple times, and as I had warned you — but you wouldn't listen to me. You thought I didn't know. You thought, 'Oh, well, your situation is unique. Dumbass. Well, you don't understand the particulars of my situation, I can go over to my ex's house, it's all cool.' No, it ain't. But you wouldn't listen. So then it got ugly, you know, as it does, and, well now, how do you feel? Sad. Then you're like, 'Oh, I wish I had — the last six months are just some, like, meaningless blur of activity that I enjoyed at the time and now I'm paying the price for it just like the Holy Mother Roman Catholic Church told me that I would pay that price, you know, and now here I am, and I'm not even Catholic yet I have to pay it anyway, what kind of bullshit situation is that?' Well, that's the situation you bought yourself, going against. But anyway. So, yeah. So you find yourself going through boxes, and now you're not thinking of taking stuff back, you're gonna throw it away. And it's going to cost you. And again, I told you. You wouldn't listen. Enjoy. (2007-10-01)
• This is a song about how sometimes you may be running through your books... and you may find a bookmark in one of them that may be the ID of a person who is no longer in your daily spirit... And you may say to yourself, 'Wherever did she go'. (2009-09-29)