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When you pre-order the record, you'll get to hear 'Animals,' one of the songs on the record I am proudest of. One of the female voices on the record is my fellow garbageheart, Star Anna Krogstie. Star and I were fans of each others’ music and started talking via text. Never having met in person, she flew out to NYC to do a couple weeks on the road with me in 2015. It wasn’t great. But we found a certain kinship, a shared resonant frequency. When my book came out in 2016, we met up in Washington for a show, then she flew down to LA with me. After a night on the couch in my camper, we did 38 shows in 40 days around the country: San Diego across to Florida, up to Minneapolis, then over to New York state and down to NYC. Yeah, that’s the four corners of this huge fucked-up country of ours. We still haven’t recovered and I don’t think we ever will. But out of that 40 days of suffering, I got a lifetime friendship, probably the deepest, most-positive friendship I’ve ever had with a woman. I'm indebted to her for many things, only one of which is her presence on this record.

I wrote the riff for 'Animals' while living in a trailer in my sister's backyard. It’s changed a lot from banging it out on my old Seagull acoustic but I’ll be honest, I was delighted that I finally wrote a Nirvana song, if 25 years too late. Star and I shared a lot of war stories on the road about drinking and drugging and stupid, self-destructive youthful relationships, the shitty things we did to ourselves and other undeserving people. This song is about my last years out in the wild while I was living in Greenpoint, trying to quit drugs and trying to quit a couple of girls and also enthusiastically not quitting anything at all.
The first line of the chorus, I nicked from Nick Cave. I’ve loved Nick Cave since 1992 but it’s always kinda bummed me out that he’s so beloved by the NPR crowd that they’re willing to give him a pass on a lot of fucked-up shit he’s said/ written/ sung for the last 30 years. Don’t get me wrong, he’s evolved and I’m deeply invested in the idea of flawed men being able to evolve but it’s like the world en masse decided that ‘The Boatman’s Call’ meant that the ‘skirt-murdering’ Birthday Party never happened and, thankfully, that just ain’t the case. So I stole a problematic line from ‘Do You Love Me’ to see if I’d get strung up where he got a pass.

And then I decided that trying to get away with shit was problematic either way so I worked to invert expectations. Please: listen to the words, of all my songs, of every song, but specifically to the words of this song. The man and the woman in the song are enslaved to each other, but she is sexually dominant: the man is the concubine. Yeah, the first chorus is questionable on its own, but track the pronouns, folks. She is bleeding, then he is bleeding, then they are bleeding together. At the end of the second verse, he’s lost his power and she’s kept hers. Among other things, the song’s about castration, about a man losing control, about a man losing power. It’s also about getting old enough that you can become friends with your old lovers. You can look back on the bad old days together—all the weird desperate insecure shit you did to impress each other, to possess each other—and laugh. We were out of our fucking heads, weren’t we?

lyrics

When I was an animal, I lived in a cave
I got so fucking high, I didn’t come down for days
When we were animals, our bed was grave
I was your concubine, you were my slave
When we were animals

Blood running down the inside of your legs
Blood running down the side of my head
We were not wounded, we were already dead
When we were animals

You were an animal, an animal you remained
I cried and called, I screamed and howled
That lonely night you ran away

I’m still an animal, king of my cage
Turn on the TV, Frank Sinatra singing ‘My Way’
I didn’t get my way

Blood running down the inside of my legs
Blood running down the side of your head
We were not wounded, we were already dead
When we were animals

Blood running down the insides of our legs
Blood running down the sides of our heads
We were not wounded, we were already dead
When we were

credits

from When We Were Animals, released May 1, 2018
Star Anna on female vocals

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Mishka Shubaly image

Mishka Shubaly Phoenix, Arizona

Shipwreck survivor, Jeopardy clue, bestselling writer, road dog on house arrest.

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