From the mouth of Zach Williams himself: The first clutch of songs you hear in this program are from an album I made and released in 2018 called Gaki. The title of the record is also the pen name of Ryunosuke Akutogawa, author of "In a Bamboo Grove" and Rashomon." He used Gaki to sign his haiku, and the term is generally translated as "hungry ghost." In folklore, the hungry ghost survives on dregs, whatever we leave behind, whether its garbage, spiritual energy, or literal waste. The songs on this record took nearly a decade to take enough shape as something close to an album, so the process felt like an unburdening of a bunch of ideas and feelings I'd been working with since around 2009. The skeletons of some of them began forming in other bands but never got finished. I take forever to finish anything. Still, I'm proud of much of the stuff on here, "Kneeless" especially, considering it arose spontaneously out of the process of finishing everything else.
"Lavender Anorak" is the last thing I finished, back in November of last year, part of a new project called Purple. It contains a monologue by Peter Ivers, host of New Wave Theater, a show that showcased post-punk acts in the eighties. Ivers was a musician himself, releasing several albums before his murder in 1983. You should listen to his song, "You Used to Be Stevie Wonder." The monologue sampled in "Lavender Anorak" sums up what we're probably all feeling pretty well. Optimism is heroic in times like this; we should try to keep the faith despite the skeletons at our banquet. In his words: "If we all weren't living under the threat of famine bomb fever, it'd make no difference if people ever found out who they were or what they're doing on this planet. But because of this threat, it's become necessary to alert anyone and everyone that could possibly care."
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