Out Of Jail: A Breakup Story in 4/4 Time

How a They Might Be Giants breakup song taught me about loss, projection, and letting go.

75% Healed, Still Hurting in New Places

I don’t know how far I am into the healing process but it feels like I’m 75% of the way through. Still, I seem to be finding new and previously untraversed places that still ache. Most of the essays I’ve shared were prefaced by the fact that I bought the John Henry album when it released just four months prior to my uncle’s suicide. It is an album wrought with emotional pitfalls for me.

What I did not anticipate was how many of the songs were just waiting to continue writing back to me with new emotional ties this many years later. Each one finding its way into the debris field of my recent divorce and shining a different kind of spotlight on this wreckage.

Out Of Jail is a stone-cold banger. The guitars and organ duel perfectly, creating a push-pull energy that mirrors the emotional turbulence in the lyrics.

Musically, it’s classic TMBG subversion: the 4/4 rock setup instantly skews with those triplet-ish snare hits.

boom TAT / boom TAT-TAT-TAT / boom TAT-TAT-TAT / boom TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT

It jolts your ear forward, like momentum refusing to die down even when the story ends. That un-conventional beat flips a switch in our listening ear by not being the simple pop-rock beat we expected to hear. It also lends a very progressive, moving-forward-with-energy kind of vibe. It’s fantastic.

I’ll never skip it. Not to avoid the baggage attached, but to celebrate it.

A Song That Waited for Me

Out Of Jail was never one of the emotional ones. It’s upbeat, catchy, full of interesting sounds. But a few weeks into my writing journey for this album, and Out Of Jail became a song about the promises I hung onto long after the person they were made with has left town.

Long before the screen door slammed,

she was out of Xenia.

A stranger could have loved that town,

but she had to leave.

In the song, Xenia is just a small Ohio town chosen by John Flansburgh due to his proximity while in art school. For me, it was my marriage.

My wife was out of “Xenia” long before she closed the door behind her. Years before she physically left, the relationship had already started leaking through the cracks. I can look back now and see the moments when she’d emotionally packed her bags. Back when I still thought there was something I could change or fix.

People told us how lucky we both were to have found each other. She told me I was her perfect match. But there was always an urge whispering to her that a life better suited for her existed beyond our little town of “us.” A stranger might have loved that town. She had to leave.

Projection and Reflection

I wish I’d gotten to know her

Before I fell in love

We had every opportunity to pump the breaks and take our time but I didn’t. It’s hard to really see a person after you’ve fallen in love.

Carl Jung said falling in love is a projection of the self onto another. It’s intoxicating because we think we’ve found them, but really we’ve found a reflection. So this lyric has become a finger pointing back at me as I listen: I loved too quickly, too fully, and it was incredible - until it was over.

You can’t love someone into staying and you can’t love someone else enough that you no longer need to leave.

The Emotional Jail Cell

Our narrator finds himself in an emotional transition. Experiencing both the grief over his ended relationship and the frustration of his unrelenting looping thoughts. Obsessing over each clue; each sign that he believes was always pointing at this outcome.

He’s holding ‘Kitten’ in a jail in his mind. Our narrator’s only way forward is by letting ‘Kitten’ out of that jail and releasing both of them from all the accusations and blame.

Two weeks into writing about songs from this album, I published the essay for Sleeping in the Flowers, and my wife teared up when I read it to her. It was about my lifelong journey of heartbreak and how I’d hear that song and connect it to my deep sense of longing to be seen and loved but only finding toxicity or loss. Until she came along. We even had a day lying in a park field, tiny flowers all around, and I remember thinking, this is the song made real.

It was real. And it still ended. I will always look back at those years with fondness, appreciation, and love.

The Night at the Neptune

By mid-June, the writing was on every wall. Things were messy and fragile. But we had tickets to see They Might Be Giants at the Neptune Theater in Seattle with my youngest. It was going to be a night I been looking forward to anchoring me to something joyful and get me out of my worried anxious loops about the love of my life slipping away from me.

Nine minutes into the set: those opening three chords of Out of Jail.
And I thought, This fucking live show is going to make me think about it anyway.

Instead of crying, I belted out every word at the top of my lungs along with a theater full of people like me. It was one of the most healing and present moments I’ve ever had.

Where I Am Now

These days, I’m doing better. Instead of obsessing over what was lost or replaying perceived betrayals, I’m letting my own “Kitten” out of jail.

I’m learning that love isn’t just the romantic kind. It’s the steady, weird, gentle love you give and get from friends who see you rebuilding in real time.

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