Ani Di Franco inspired "Everyone Loves the Political Singersongwriter." On one of her albums—I think it was "Revelling/Reckoning" (oops, make that 2 of her albums)—the politics started get really heavy handed. I mean even for her. I saw her in concert on that tour and I remember even more of the same. Her audience ate it up, however.

Me, I don't like being told what to think, or to have my morality handed down to me. I'm quirky that way. And I said in disbelief to Helvetica as we left that night, "Wow...Everyone loves a political singersongwriter." Then added, "...that they agree with." Yeah. I said it. And the syntax was exactly that bad.

Fortunately, as the song idea was born and developed, I cleaned up the syntax andm, in writing it, stepped into Ani's shoes and the pressure she must feel to write political stuff. At first, I imagined that she sees herself as pissing people off with her political statements, but of course that's all wrong and probably not her mindset.

Judging by her banter way back on "Living in Clip," she pisses people off when she's NOT political. But I digress.

When my song was all written I discovered—surprise, surprise—that I hadn't painted anybody's interior but my own. It's a great summation of my own gadfly personality (one VERY like Larry David's on "Curb Your Enthusiasm"). It's not at all flattering, this portrait, but there's a good degree of self-acceptance in it somehow.

As I said in the notes for "Liberal Blues," I'm not a political singersongwriter. I am a political junkie. It's in the blood. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. My dad was a major bureaucrat. I used to watch inauguration parades go by on Pennsylvania Avenue from my dad's office in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House. (Back when parades had missiles!!)

It's in the blood, but that's all. It functions the way sports enthusiasm functions for most people. I read it. I talk it. I watch it. But I don't play.

This is a waltz. Can't have an album without one. I did the drum track trick used extensively on the album previous to this one—"Sieve & Moor"—where I take a beat and slow it down to like 24 bpm and then play along like it's moderately paced. That is, I'll take one of the pre-made beats on the machine, slow it all the way down, then edit the guts out of it. For waltzes, I never use the waltz beats. I take the blues beats instead. I don't know enough musical theory to know why that works, but it does.

"Everyone..." was the last song on the album, and the last new song given a music video on the last episode of "The vonHummer Hour." It's a nice sum up. I always think you should release every album as if you were going to die shortly afterward, and consider that the world will look at the last song and think...This is representative of that artist's life...This song is a good one in that respect.