Too Many Nights

• Survivor's Remorse
• Incarceration
• Grief
• Faith
• Fatherhood

This is the survivor's-remorse record. The mechanic is the arithmetic of a debt that has already been legally settled and emotionally never will be. "I'm a free man, but I'm servin a sentence." They took sand out of his hourglass and it cannot be replenished. He is trying to fade the image and purge the image and it comes back every time he closes his eyes. Verse two names it — survivor's guilt — and refuses the easy comfort of horoscopes or psychics.

He asks God for a deal. Verse three is the most exposed thing here: sitting alone in the dark wishing he could trade places, cold shower and clothes on, faces coming. He named his sons Jesus and Lazarus because after what the street did he needed a savior. What it cost was a friend and the version of himself that did not need one. What came after is roses he should have given while the man was alive.

Some wounds don't heal… they just keep their distance

The sound

F#m7 to F#m9 to Dsus2 to Cmaj7, never resolving. Heavy left-hand piano motif, a chopped 70s soul sample pitched low and filtered, rain and sirens, choir thickening each hook, Korg piano accents.

The story behind it

He notes it sits slightly outside the core Tow Gawd world sonically, which left its album membership an open question. It was also among his higher-streaming catalog tracks.

Plays with

Shares DNA with "Open" through the "Lust of Love" lineage; both were flagged as the softer counterweight sitting partly outside the Tow Gawd world.