Self Inflicted

• Accountability
• Regret
• Self-Sabotage
• Repair

Two words that refuse everybody else the blame. Most of this catalog is spent identifying what the world charged a man for surviving it; this title turns the ledger around and admits some of the damage was ordered by the man who paid for it. That reversal is the most difficult move in Street Gospel, because it removes the comfort of being wronged. The record stands as the moment the accounting stops being external.

What came after is the only useful thing that can follow an honest verdict against yourself: you cannot fix what you insist somebody else did to you, and naming your own hand is where repair actually begins.

The story behind it

"Self Inflicted" is the culpability record. The artist wrote it in early June, immediately before flying to Orlando, about what was actually happening around him at the time - including a shootout on the next block over. Its central question is whether the pain is self-inflicted or the result of his own decision: "is this pain self-inflicted / or did I make the decision." It sits in the E-minor trap-soul block and opens Act IV of the album, the survival act, as the real-world pressure just before the escape.

Plays with

Paired continuation is "Killer Whales," written in the same window and sequenced back-to-back: culpability into displacement.