Nothing Knew

Song story & origins

Introduction

The title track on Nothing New was written in 2007 and released in 2008. The album title itself plays on a double meaning: at first I planned a minimalist record of older songs—literally nothing new—but then the wordplay took hold. I started wondering what it would mean if Nothing—the emptiness I felt in those years—were the only thing that actually knew what was coming. That’s how the new song “Nothing Knew” (K-N-E-W) was born—ironically, the one new song on Nothing New.

The context was a hard run of years. In 2002, after I failed to achieve tenure—publish or perish, and I had published, but perished anyway—we left a town and community we loved and moved to Texas. Not long after, I took what felt like a dream job as director of a youth and family camp in New Mexico (a place that had been wonderful for us years earlier). It was church-affiliated, and I should have guessed my own progressive bent might clash with expectations. After about two years of good work and good people, it ended badly. We went “home” again to that wonderful little town, where I stepped into ministry at a small, supportive church. Within a year or so, the pattern repeated—again over theological differences—and it ended.

That “third punch” sent us to Grand Junction, Colorado in 2007, where friends helped me land a high school English job. We moved fast—rented a small house, had no furniture, lived out of suitcases with our youngest daughter for the better part of a year. There were many good things about that time, but I also realized high-school English wasn’t sustainable for me long-term. In that little rental I built a tiny recording space in a standard closet—not a walk-in, just a cramped rack of coats and a mic—and started cutting a minimalist record. That’s where this song came from: a narrow room, a stack of losses, and a piece of wordplay that let me name the ache I was feeling.

Where the song came from

Those lines came straight out of the three hits my family and I had taken. I kept trying to stand up, and then we’d get knocked down again—first the tenure denial, then the camp, then the church. The lyric’s double meaning was deliberate: if you only hear it, you might think I’m saying there’s “nothing new” here—just more of the same. But on the page, Nothing Knew turns “nothing” into a character. That Nothing seemed to anticipate my falls, to know the bitter end, to watch me not come safely home.

The lines about broken mind and good friend came from asking whether the common denominator was me—if I was misreading or misfiring somehow. “Nothing stings like alcohol” reaches for the memory of a mother’s cotton ball on a childhood wound: it’s supposed to clean it, but first it hurts. That’s how addressing an open wound felt—trying to clean something raw and only feeling the sting. “Nothing echoes down the hall” is the hollow of institutions—universities, schools, churches—when you’re working late in a big building that’s already gone dark and quiet, trying to make sense of what just happened.

When the bridge says, “Nothing comes between us,” it sounds like a promise of closeness. But within the song’s logic, it’s a paradox: that same Nothing does come between us—misunderstandings, absence, emptiness—wedging itself between people who care about one another.

The next verse pushes the despair further. “Nothing always speaks the truth” can be heard two grim ways: either emptiness is the truest thing there is, or nothing ever speaks truth—everything lies. Then comes Booth—“Nothing stopped old mister Booth”—the one who murdered the great emancipator. After that, the lines widen to public sorrow: hungry children whose bellies are filled with nothing; a war we’re building that nothing seems to pacify. It felt like a private war too—idealistic, maybe ideological—played out in places and people I loved, and it divided us rather than bringing us together.

The song closes with “Nothing gained, Nothing lost / Nothing heads off the next Holocaust.” It’s a harsh rhyme, and I hear the poor-me in it now, but that’s where I was: empty, lost, uncertain what any of it meant. Shortly after, we moved back to the town we’d loved, where we still live. In that sense, it’s a sad song with a quiet happy ending.

Music and arrangement

The recording is true to the closet studio reality: acoustic guitar at the core, a six-string banjo (tuned like a guitar) for color so the chording stayed familiar, lead vocal with harmony tucked in. The vocal is intentionally vulnerable—haunted, even. Sometimes the right thing to do is let the sorrow speak, and this track needed that. It’s sparse by design, and that sparseness is part of the catharsis.

Why it stays with me

Because it names a season exactly as it was: transitional, painful, and yet honest. The pun isn’t a gimmick so much as a doorway—letting me talk about the emptiness without pretending it was anything else. It’s the only genuinely new song on Nothing New, and it earned its place by telling the truth of that year. Not a permanent home, not the last word—just the sound of standing in the hallway, listening to the echo, and writing it down.

Here is Episode 12: As We Are Known, edited in the same narrative-with-headings style as your earlier chapters. I removed only the show-style framing (“Songcast,” weekly plugs, download links) and preserved every reflection, story, and musical detail from your transcript. I also verified the lyric lines against your lyric book.

Source: New Music Memoir (1).docx