the music he was making and the person he really was led to a crisis concerning his work as a musician: "I lost all interest in writing music, or identifying as a ‘songwriter’. I got into my van with enough mushrooms to choke a horse and started driving down the coast with nowhere to go. After a few weeks, I was writing a novel, which is where I finally found my narrative voice. The voice that is actually useful. It was a while before that voice started manifesting in a musical way, but once I settled in the Laurel Canyon spider-shack where I’m living now, I spent months demoing all these weird-ass songs about weird-ass experiences almost in real-time, and kind of had this musical ‘Oh-there-I-am’ moment, identical to how I felt when I was writing the book. It was unbelievably liberating. I knew there was never any going back to the place I was writing from before, which was a huge relief. The monkey got banished off my back." The "monkey" he's speaking about is specified in an interview for No Depression as a wrong idea of oneself: "When I was in high school I wanted to be an obscure singer-songwriter. I really wanted to be one of those guys that nobody knew about, and in some weird way, I fulfilled that. It all makes perfect sense to me. I wanted to be like Townes Van Zandt, Nick Drake, or Gram Parsons. Somebody who was respected but unknown. That was the most romantic thing to me. Guys like Richard Buckner. And as I was doing those records, I felt like I was part of the club, and I got to meet some of those guys. It was like I got invited into the inner sanctum. I was really into it for a long time, but I just ran out of things to do in it. [...] At some point, I realized that in order to go where I needed to go, and where I wanted to creatively, I had to kill that mythology and I had to kill that idea. I said to myself "You are not "that", you are a man." You have to not want to be anyone else, or want to be "anything" else. You have to just be what you are. I realized that I am a smart-ass, and that I have always been a