[Guitarist] Greg [Ahee] had given me a demo of this song at the very beginning of thinking about the next record. Even in that form it sounded like it could be the opening salvo and he was thinking the same thing. After that agreement, we put it aside and it cleared up my anxiety knowing that it was lurking in the background somewhere. Any little inspiration or dumb bit of line I came up with got thrown in there at some point. Pretty early on I had, ‘She’s just trying to reach you,’ but I didn’t know who ‘she’ was or what she was trying to say. I’m still not one hundred percent certain. I also knew I wanted to start the album with an apology or a warning that whatever followed was maybe not completely true. Those two ideas were all I had — the one line and feeling I needed to cover my ass.

Reading The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton was a big inspiration. It was heartening to read that a guy in the 1700s was wrestling with the sadness of living and the inequities of the world. ‘The more things change,’ and all that. It’s where I found out about Heraclitus, which gave me a roundabout way of singing about the Flint water crisis. I guess that part is about the unceasing wheel of tragedies and how the Flint story has receded from the headlines even though the man-made suffering remains. The Elvis story is from a biography by Peter Guralnick. Al Stewart also wrote a song about the same part in the book, which I didn’t know about until recently. I guess that proves it was the most interesting part.

–NPR