Hunter Nelson

The Truth.

I was originally thinking about someone as a mini Charles Manson because it's always fascinated me.

So much terrible stuff that he believed and did came out of his mishearing of the White Album and telling everyone else, here's what these songs really mean.

And I was just sort of thinking like, I mean, as awful as Charles Manson is, I was thinking about people who have small versions of that, like little petty versions of misunderstanding lyrics or projecting your own beliefs onto music.

and making it a part of your personality.

There's an ugly, psychotic version of it, which is the Charles Manson version, obviously.

Or there's just little ways that people fit these things into their lives, like building their philosophy on whatever their relationship with music is.

And then I think there was a whole second stage to this where I started thinking about what if it was just the drive to go listen to the record, which instantly made me have to make Howard a much realer character and invest in him a lot more and decide a lot more.

Who he actually was and what his effect on Nick would be.

The original concept of it was like, how long would you... If you were...

dead set on listening to something that you knew someone had, how much would you ignore?

How much of them would you rationalize away because you want to hear that record so bad?

In the original concept, I was thinking like, how many red flags can I throw up?

Then I just started

Going through people I know and experiences I've had, it became a lot less about an actual scary person to me and more about what do we know about the people that we sort of put ourselves in the hands of, at the mercy of.

How much room should you give someone to...

indulge their sort of darker thoughts or their or when they let you in on something that they have like some sort of half-formed quasi you know somewhat scary philosophy you know is there something about somebody who has an intense passion for something that make the that is more dramatically interesting do you think um i i like in general the idea of uh

having people communicate through a passion, through something, through a third point of reference that

you basically can hear what they need emotionally through how they talk about something that they love.

I think that the low stakes of pop culture or of music is a nice place to put little feelings you have or to ask for things.