"Mental illness is something that people normally do not want to speak about. It's too icky, too disturbing or too inappropriate for whatever may be palatable to their mood at the time. Looking at someone in that state, you eventually become it, in order to contend with it. You have to believe what they believe to survive in it.

That is the reality that is dictated by the moment. If you are around someone long enough who is afraid, you will also feel it too. Likewise, everything is basically real, because it's real to someone you love, and so it's real to you, because you love them. In that circumstance and all others, the thing that remains is love. I wrote the song, in case one day something would come from it.

I was taking care of a friend who was deeply ill. He suffers from undiagnosed, untreated, depression and paralyzing anxiety. In the dead of winter, I used to take care of him for years. Each day he spent highly paranoid and covering his eyes with a cloth to avoid having to see anything. One day I discovered an army of maggots making their way across the ceiling toward a cheerios box. I called him out to look. He didn't believe they were real. Then, I wasn't sure either. That was where the words came from. Traveling maggots."