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Us? How about I break up this fucking band and you’ll see what the fuck us means? But I didn’t say anything. Again: trying to keep the rage from busting me apart. We went into the art director’s office, she passed around the books, I sat there shaking, scowling, unable to get it together to be the slightest bit cordial, professional. “Is there anything . . . wrong?” she asked.

I mumbled an answer that maybe wasn’t composed of actual words.

Stanley Ray took me to a club called Fez—in the lounge was a portrait of Oum Kalthoum in a gilt frame—in a basement on Lafayette Street so deep that the subway overpowered the music when it rumbled under the stage. A band called The Magnetic Fields was playing: never heard of them. Also, this guy Elliott Smith. Never heard of him, either.

The show changed my life. I mean, it actually changed my life.

The Magnetic Fields’s singer, Stephin Merritt, was sort of troll-like, with a low, croaking voice. The songs were transcendent and the lyrics cuttingly shrewd. I’d say it was an arch take on the best’80s pop, but imbued with huge, tragic heart—but, though apt, that description can’t capture the ineffable wondrousness of the songs. He kept giving the sound guy a death stare during the show for something messed up in the monitors.

Elliott Smith was a solo acoustic guy—as I used to be—with a wavering voice; gripping, stringent songs that seemed to unspool, lyrics radiating passion and desperation.

There was a blizzard the next day. I walked to Avenue A in a spooky, blank world. There were no cars. I walked in the middle of the white street. The racket of Manhattan was gone. Otherworldly. I heard my boots crunching in the snow, the wind. I went to a tiny record store, picked up an Elliott Smith CD and a Magnetic Fields CD.

It was just a few months after the nightmare of the second album: January 1996. It was time to do something where I only had to rely on myself. I took some songs that my bandmates had rejected—too normal—and wrote some new ones. I named it before I made it: Skittish.

There was a producer named Kramer who had made albums by two bands that I loved, Low and Galaxie 500. The spare music floated in a billow of reverb.

So I would abandon the Soul Coughing sound entirely.

Kramer’s studio was in an extravagant New Jersey suburb. He had bought a house once owned by a disco drummer of some renown who lost his fortune to a crack habit. There was a studio the size of half a gymnasium, bedecked in shag carpet—floor, walls, and ceiling—with concentric sun patterns set off in slightly beige-er shag.

We cut nearly twenty songs in a single day, just acoustic guitar and voice, me sitting in the darkness of the vast carpeted chamber. Kramer was invisible almost the entire time, seated below the control room window, smoking joints. An assistant did the work. Kramer’s one solid contribution was to disallow me from doing a second take on an electric guitar overdub. Yet it sounded exactly like I wanted it to sound. It was unmistakably a Kramer record. It was more than the reverb—which was achieved with big echo plates running down the sides of his garage—there was an eerie plaintiveness to the music. It wasn’t the assistant: he was a new guy. Kramer put some other parts on after I left, but mostly it’s just as it was laid down that day.

I walked with a tape. Later, I tried to get the master tape from him, and he equivocated weirdly. It turned out that Kramer only owned two reels of tape, erasing and rerecording on them, for every record, over and over again.

Stanley Ray was irritated when I played Skittish for him. He’d spent a lot of energy keeping us from breaking up. He certainly wasn’t going to help me get Warner Bros. to put the record out.

I make inexplicable decisions to get with a certain kind of woman. A short woman, a Latina, an Asian woman, an artist, a non-artist, a woman above twenty-nine but below thirty-three; it’s less than a fetish, more like an arbitrary criterion. Maybe