"I had a narrator in this song called 'Counterfeit Florida Plates' who was schizophrenic -- he was starting to see things and he had no place to sleep at night. ... The song is about a guy's turn into paranoia, so then I think, 'well, all my experience with that comes from when I was a psychiatric nurse -- so I know a lot of things people think and say when they're in their paranoid moments.' So then I started thinking, 'well, they're the persons who've often been out on the streets for a while, and seem pretty sick. He hasn't bathed in a while -- some of that is because maybe he’s afraid if he bathes something bad will happen to him.'"
"I had a narrator in this song called 'Counterfeit Florida Plates' who was schizophrenic -- he was starting to see things and he had no place to sleep at night. ... The song is about a guy's turn into paranoia, so then I think, 'well, all my experience with that comes from when I was a psychiatric nurse -- so I know a lot of things people think and say when they're in their paranoid moments.' So then I started thinking, 'well, they're the persons who've often been out on the streets for a while, and seem pretty sick. He hasn't bathed in a while -- some of that is because maybe he’s afraid if he bathes something bad will happen to him.'"
http://www.shufflemag.com/john-darnielle-on-songwriting-101-and-the-next-mountain-goats-lp/