One song that does, Danny Callahan, is about a boy dying with "bad bone marrow". The song is about a boy Oberst met for a moment. "I don't know if that was his last name," he says. "I know it was his first name. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do. The idea is to get to a truth that is apart from the person who created it, something that anyone can look at and find something that resonates as being true – not true in the factual sense, but true in the more universal sense, a truth that you can see."
One song that does, Danny Callahan, is about a boy dying with "bad bone marrow". The song is about a boy Oberst met for a moment. "I don't know if that was his last name," he says. "I know it was his first name. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do. The idea is to get to a truth that is apart from the person who created it, something that anyone can look at and find something that resonates as being true – not true in the factual sense, but true in the more universal sense, a truth that you can see."