The compost everything grew from: companion notes and raw fragments, the loose pages where the finished work was still only a sound and a smell and a horse.
The artist's own note on Something in Rearview. Not an explanation of the song, a way into it: the rupture at its center, the senses charted on either side, three horses at both ends of the frame.
Something in Rearview was made to translate a lived mental rhythm rather than tell a linear story. The aim was not to explain an emotion but to reproduce how a mind actually moves through a life: a constant cycle of focus and drift, zoning out and snapping back, repetition, return, déjà vu.
The structure is deliberately fluid, built to flow the way memory and consciousness do. Fragmented, looping, unresolved, yet coherent when you take it whole. The imagery stays autobiographical and unembellished: a blue pickup with tan leather seats, sixty-degree nights, vinyl spinning, a Polaroid clicking, flowers bought ritually with no long promise, and Burr, the black-and-white dog whose fur looks like a tuxedo. Anchors, so the abstraction cannot float away.
At the center is a deliberate rupture: the blur, marked by the line like fainting at a church pew. This moment is neither before nor after. It is in between. A brief loss of orientation where certainty and narrative coherence give way. It is not a confession and not an explanation. It is an honest admission that some transitions are not remembered clearly because they were lived internally rather than narrated.
The genius of the blur is its refusal to resolve. It preserves its own opacity, trusting that disorientation itself can be true.
The final image repeats and anchors the whole piece. Three black horses: the artist, his two brothers, one shared life unfolding along different trajectories. Two grounded, one in motion, all belonging to the same frame.
Ten years of loose lines from the notebook. Cold air on a mountain, a car that becomes a house, snow chains rattling under the engine on the way to the top. Sequenced as they compounded.
To make somebody start thinking you first have to turn on their brain. That is why evocation and defamiliarization matter so much, in language, in music. Once the brain is on and ready to listen, then you can tell them what you came to tell them.
Paper, pen, and a page with no middle, only a beginning and an end.
Draw a truth that's equal both ways.
Two horse parables from the book, set side by side. The old story sends one to glory, one to work, one to silence. This one rewrites the ending: loyalty is not who disappears, it is what you build so no one has to.
True loyalty is not sacrifice. True loyalty is architecture. You build it so no one has to disappear.
The old stories always require someone to vanish. The hero's journey demands the offering. The saint must suffer, the builder must burn out. Someone pays so the structure can stand. This is the lie at the center of every mythology that came before. Architecture does not require sacrifice. It requires precision. It requires that every participant stays visible, that no one carries a load they cannot bear, that the structure holds because it was designed to hold and not because someone is pinned beneath it.
All three horses are yours to ride. The question is not which one is right. The question is which one you choose to ride right now, and which rhythm you will dance while you ride it. You cannot ride the burning horse by copying someone else's route. You can only ride it by being in motion. By choosing. By building. By standing in the middle and refusing to disappear.