It's really spot on for this moment in time. Still is one of my favorite albums of all time. Just a perfect synthesis of music and ideas. It's a perfect record really. An album, as we used to say, where you could sit down and play it from beginning to end and it had an impact. I suppose each song probably had a separate influence and the cycle of songs did not follow a single character, but as a listener, I imagined one guy, who goes from sitting in this car surrounded by darkness he could touch, knowing he was in the wrong place with the wrong guy, through a harrowing story to where he is broken and shattered and finds that all he knows and wants is the simplicity and honesty of coming home to a woman he dearly loves and an attempt to let his past be past. In a world he had experienced as deceptive, vicious, and as nature is, uncaring toward our existence, in the end, love is what can be trusted to give you a sense of why we are here and what it means to belong. To be home. 

I guess, my imagining of the tale was in part due to other things about the record and about the liner notes and so, my invention of a single character that you follow through the story of each song made a lot of sense for me. He was not a guy in the music business though and the tale was more operatic in a Godfather kind of way, but rather than gangsters, a politically connected family that did what they did out of a sense of duty, or perceived duty, to the country. There always being three things human beings will commit true horrors for in the name of good, religion, country, and family. 

Because I had my own imagined story when you were at least thinking of something that may be for Broadway related to the record, I wondered what story you had in mind to tie it all together, or if that was even how you thought of it. 

I think for this song you said somewhere once, that the guy in the car was in the record/entertainment business. In my head, just as the listener, I thought of him being in an entirely different line of work. 

Do you see the songs as separate self contained stories, or did you see/imagine a throughline with them to tell a larger story for something like a Broadway musical or film?