Miscellany
The album title comes from a Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.”
This line is often misquoted as,
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with their song still in them.”
Some believe that this misquotation is a hybridization between the Walden quote and a line by Oliver Wendell Holmes from his poem, The Voiceless, that appears in the Quiet Desperation liner notes:
“Alas for those that never sing, but die with all their music in them!”
Regarding the theme of the liner notes, Jorgenson states that he wanted to create a mood of “rotting youth” . “I started taking pictures of toys arranged in ways that evoked in me one of the things i am constantly battling with: the sense that over time the ideas and sentiments of youth are transformed and perverted into a horrifying new reality. They’re not replaced–I still remember the optimism and joy of my youth, and even still believe in some of it. But now having “seen the strings” in the world, the purity of those times are tinged with…i don’t know…sickly colors. That’s what I wanted to capture. The other thing I get preoccupied with is the unrelenting nature of…for lack of a better word…entropy. Everything everywhere is constantly aging…trying to become more disordered. I perceive life as this constant, futile, but often beautiful, struggle against this phenomenon. That’s really the thematic crux of both the art and the record.”
When asked about his influences, Jorgenson’s response was curious: “visual art has influenced my musical ideas as much as music has. This includes graphic designers like David Carson—I like the way he fractures words and images to achieve effects–as well my favorite painters; people like Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Rothko and Pollock, Chagall, Ernst and Magritte and maybe Edward Hopper…I know that’s a bit of a schizophrenic list! Anyway, it’s all about balance and composition. Music is the same way. As far as musical influence there’s nothing surprising…The Beatles, The Smiths, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, The Pixies…it almost seems canned since so many indie rock people seem to listen to this stuff…but that’s the music I always come back to. There is a lot in the current and recent indie music scene that is very inspiring as well.
