I did not want this song to be moralizing. I don’t want to condemn or praise.
“Hey Dorkmeyer” serves as an honest picture of a complicated individual, balancing sympathy with unflinching and harsh words. This is also a goodbye to a kind of life that is fading into history: people sitting around a kitchen table until all hours, drinking, smoking, telling stories, entertaining each other with wit and conversation.
Especially with addiction, there is a hostility towards those who point out there is a problem, from the addict and enabler alike. I usually write about my experiences with a sideways glance, yet “Hey Dorkmeyer” required more brutal lyrics to convey the self-destruction of this figure in my life. I found it both challenging and rewarding to write a fictionalized account of real individuals. It is difficult keeping the feelings of those who knew him from affecting the writing. But we dishonor the dead if we aren’t completely honest about how they lived and died.
Thank you for taking the time to listen,
The Stars of Disaster
