This was originally 3 different albums I wrote and recorded in my parents' apartment in Brooklyn when I was 16 years old, but I realized they work better put together as one longer album. This was the first music I'd written and recorded in about 5 years at the time, because I'd taken a long hiatus from music to focus on filmmaking, photography, and poetry. A lot of it is about what I was going through at the time, to do with my experiences of psychiatric abuse, systems of power and control, grappling with unresolved trauma and despair, a general sense of death in the air, and occasional bursts of romance and absurdist humor and optimism.

Some of the first songs I made in that time were poems I wrote and read aloud over music ("Campaigning in Multiple Visions", "On My Way Up The Block", "The Black Squirrel"), and I also made a lot of instrumentals in that time (tracks 16-20). A lot of these songs were later reinvented and rerecorded on other albums ("Stranger Dreams" became "Beautiful, Terrifying" on my 2019 album Rhinoceros Crossing, and there's a ridiculously fast, shouty version of "Midnight in Kingston" on my 2014 album Icepick), but you'll hear a very different version of everything on here. "My Love is Away" was actually the first proper song I ever wrote, when I was 8 years old in early 2002, and the version on this album may be the only surviving recording of it.

Tracks 1-8 were originally an album titled Campaigning in Empty Apartments (From Room to Room), tracks 9-15 were Driving at Night on the Highway, and tracks 16-20 were The Nightmare Station, which was an all-instrumental album that I recorded before the other two. The album cover is a photo I took in Nevada in December 2006.