It was almost like he was seeing how far his empathy, and ours, could extend. It would have been different, I imagine, if he’d labored over the songs rather than just letting them come fast. “It was the people in the songs,” Scott Kempner says. You never hate Johnny 99. You feel for him. They take his house away, he gets drunk, he kills somebody. You still don’t hate him. He’s all instinct. Nothing else in there but pure instinct. We all know a little about that, even if something finally keeps us in check. We see ourselves in there,
