Track list for Sad Bastard Ballads.

1. What To Do When Faced with the Prospect
2. Under My Skin
3. Everything and the Stars
4. Bittersweet Thing
5. Bemused and Beguiled
6. Get Ready
7. Pink Lemonade
8. What Do You Do (When You’re Alone)?
9. Still
10. You Can Do Anything
11. High Hopes
12. When I Was Young
13. It’s a Motherfucker (The Motherfucker Suite Part II)
14. Winter Nights
15. Letting Go
16. Silence

Other songs recorded for this album can be found in the Other Songs section.

Commentary for the album:

When I came up with the concept behind this album I thought it was pretty good. The concept being, for all intents and purposes, nostalgia. I wanted to keep all the songs simple and record them with as few overdubs as possible. On all the songs, the rhythm guitar and lead vocals were recorded live, something I hadn’t done this extensively since my forth album, Victor, in 2000. The lyrical content of most of the songs are very personal and represent a lot of the shit I’ve been putting up with of late, mostly involving unrequited love (is there any other type?). This is something I’ve avoided, for the most part, for several years. The main reason I abandoned writing these types of songs (sad bastard songs as we call them) is because I felt they were all beginning to sound alike with no real variation to what I was saying, or trying to say, with each one. Since I knew I’d grown as a songwriter and it had been a while since I’d really focused on writing sad bastard songs, I thought it would be a good idea to take another, more mature attempt at it. For the most part I feel I’ve failed in this respect. I don’t think this is a great album or even a good one. It represents for me where I was in the year 2010 and I can’t pretend that anyone else who might listen to this will have any emotional connections to any of these songs. But this album changed my life in a couple profound ways.

One of these ways involves, as it tends to do, a woman. Any song on this album that’s about a woman is about her, but the odd thing is I never knew why I even liked her. She’s a hardcore Christian and I’m a staunch atheist. She’s a capitalist and I’m a socialist (or at the very least anti-capitalist). So for the longest time it boggled my mind. Then I wrote “Under My Skin” and as I was listening to the demo of it on my voice recorder, it dawned on me. I liked her because she didn’t make me feel like a loser. They’re there in the lyrics. And yet it had never occurred to me until I sat and listened to them. Now I know what you’re thinking, “You’re not a loser, surely.” I am a loser. And don’t call me Shirley. For you see, the second profound thing that happened during the making of this album was a massive realization about my life.

It happened much like the one mentioned above. I wrote “When I Was Young” and as I listened back to it, I realized how much loneliness has permeated my life. I grew up in a very small town of about eighty people (including the old folks) so there were very few kids my age that I could hang around. When I was really young my sister and two of my cousins would run around and do kid things a lot. But they were older than I was and grew out of that phase earlier than I did. So there wasn’t anyone around to join me on my excursions of pretend violence and archeology, so I was forced to go it alone and entered into a fantasy world that I haven’t really escaped from. In my fantasy I’m a badass. I’m a rock star, a novelist, a world famous film director. In reality, I’m creatively lazy. The one thing I’m prolific in (and have any talent for) is the one thing I’d never want to do for a living: being a musician.

When I was younger, there was a little pond near our house that hardly ever had water in it, but after a good rain, it would sometimes collect and one day I thought it would be a good idea to ride my bike through it. I got about two feet before the bike got caught in the mud and I was forced to fling myself to shore sans bike. I was already drenched and I couldn’t just leave the bike where it was. I could imagine my parents going to feed the dogs and looking over to find the handlebars of my bike peeking through the water. So I went back in after it. Being too embarrassed to go inside and confess my stupidity, I forced myself to stay outside to dry off. The entire time I was out there I wanted to go in. I wanted to be where it was dry and warm and safe from the parasitic stagnant water of the pond. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I preferred loneliness to comfort. And in this way I haven’t changed.

For the last ten years I’ve lived alone. I’ve lived over a third of my life alone. I don’t think there are many people who can claim such a thing. And if I look at things realistically, this will never change. That girl that inspired many of the songs here doesn’t care about any of this. She’ll move on, get married, live a long life, and never think twice about me. And that’s fine. Because I think I’m the type of person that’s supposed to be lonely. It’s in my genes. I’m not meant to experience the comfort of love that so many people have. I’m subjugated to spending my life outside, cold and wet, wishing I could be like everyone else. I think that’s what this album’s all about. And it is for this reason that my next album will be entitled, Fuck This Sad Bastard Bullshit, I’ve Got A Pocketful of Butterscotch.