In 2004 I broke up with a girlfriend of four years, quit my job, moved out of my home, and spent the rest of the year on the road, both touring with Okkervil and going to visit friends or to hide away and write. My commitment to touring as much as possible made me feel like a stranger when I came back to Austin, and everybody else in the band started feeling that way, too. At the same time, we were feeling like strangers in the country we were seeing whip by the van windows. It felt like America was starting to go insane, or we were starting to go insane, or probably both. The gorier and more lurid the newspapers got, the harder everyone seemed to be trying to demonstrate how moral, compassionate, and prosperous they were. I had never been further from prosperous, didn’t feel particularly moral, and I started realizing how guilty I’d sometimes been of simply making a show of compassion without actually practicing it. Listening to “Black Sheep Boy” and to old songs like “Knoxville Girl,” “Greenback Dollar,” “Furry’s Blues,” and “The Bully,” I was starting to get this idea in my head of a record that wasn’t compassionate, wasn’t moral, was openly an inelegant and ugly mess.

Most of the songs for the new record were written last February in Bloomington, Indiana. To get away from Austin and from everything else that was familiar, I decided to take up Darius Van Arman from Jagjaguwar on his offer of a place to stay in his usually empty house in the country. I liked the idea of being relatively isolated and of going North for the winter instead of South. Up in Bloomington, I’d set myself a daily writing shift, just like a job; I’d wake up at 10 and write until about 7 PM. One day, for fun, I decided to write a sequel to “Black Sheep Boy.” Because I’m not Tim Hardin, my sequel ended up being about five times longer than the original. The song just kept going and going and going, petering out at around nine minutes. I called it “Black Sheep Boy II” (though we eventually changed the name to “So Come Back, I Am Waiting” when we were working up the Black Sheep Boy artwork). After “Black Sheep Boy II” came “Black Sheep Boy III” (now called “In a Radio Song”), and then “Black Sheep Boy”s IV and V, which didn’t make it to the finished record. And then many of the other songs on the record tumbled out, one after the other. I left Bloomington with the greater part of Black Sheep Boy composed.

For the rest of the year, we toured incessantly while I obsessed about the record, tweaking the language and generally obsessing about the concept to the point where I think my friends were starting to worry about me. All I could think about was how I couldn’t wait to make this record, how I hoped I wouldn’t die in on the interstate so I could finish the record. This gives you an idea of how melodramatic I was getting, though we did in fact have a calamitous accident outside of Topeka in the freezing rain when the car I was driving in skidded two 360's and slammed backwards into the left lane median, and a semi bearing down on us locked its brakes and almost jackknifed trying to avoid crashing into us.

I was overjoyed when, during a headline tour, we finally got to work up new songs like “For Real,” “Black,” and “Black Sheep Boy”s III and V. When we got back from tour, we rented a little tin shack by the Austin Bergstrom Internation Airport and immediately started intensive rehearsals for the album. Unfortunately, the air conditioners in the shack weren’t working and the average temperature hovered around 97%. We’d sit in the shack in underwear and soaked t-shirts and play and play until the auto detailing place across the lot from us couldn’t stand it anymore. Then we moved everything to Brian Beattie’s house and started recording all day and night every day. We’d play the songs all together in the wooden livingroom and bedrooms, with almost no track separation. When we were exhausted everybody would head home and I’d drive back to the little shack to sleep, and then I’d wake up, grab some breakfast tacos and coffee, and start again.

The record took about three times longer to finish than I’d expected. But I’d expected that. As we worked, William Schaff’s artwork started to pour in. It was beautiful and terrifying and slightly heavy-metal-looking, all of which pleased us. I’d gone to Providence earlier in the year to personally play William the songs and talk about the imagery, and when I started getting his Black Sheep Boy artwork in the mail I again modified the songs to fit what he’d drawn. The residue of my original idea of Black Sheep Boy action figures and comic books was that I still really wanted the art to feel closely related to the music and the lyrics.

Because the record had been sitting for so long in my brain before a note had been written or a word sung, it was really difficult for me to let go of Black Sheep Boy. It’s hard to remember, but I think there were at least four distinct mastering and re-mastering sessions, three different orders that I was sure would be the final order, a handful of songs that were almost cut from the record or almost included, and more song-title changes than anyone in the band cares to remember. We turned it in to the record company considerably past due because it was so hard for me to give it up. In a way, the record really was like my little boy, and though I knew he was the black sheep I wanted to make sure that his hair wasn’t too cowlicked and his shoes were double-knotted before I let him go out into the wild stupid world to run amok and to make me look bad, to pick on Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See and to earn the consternation of Down the River of Golden Dreams and to never write or call Sleep and Wake-Up Songs and to stay out all night causing trouble with a stray dog-eared copy of Stars Too Small to Use that I had tried to keep locked indoors.