There were only a few times during my talk with Patrick Stickles, singer and songwriter for Titus Andronicus, that our conversation felt like an interview. Instead, it really felt more lit an upper-level lit seminar. This is what we talked about: Camus, Faulkner, reader response literary theory, and whether a text has any inherent meaning. The depth of our conversation reflects not just Stickles' concern with the songwriting process but the anxiety of being a writer and his concern with whether the audience (and by audience, I mean the people hearing or reading his words) understands his authorial intent. It takes Stickles months to finish a song, and indication of the care he takes to craft that message. The result is an album like The Monitor, a concept album loosely based on the Civil War and civil war: it's about both the historical event and Stickles' existential angst.
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