Look away now if you’re squeamish. Seriously. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…
“Remedy is about a time that was pretty insane when I was a young kid. I was just a little scoundrel and pretty brutal to my parents. I was very angry and fought everything, but I look back now and I was just terrified – very insecure, depressed, and suicidal, just in a dark, dark place. Friends and I used to sit around and give each other homemade tattoos at a very young age. I went through a rough time where my parents had put me away – it wasn’t jail or prison, but a treatment centre for kids anywhere from 12 years old up to young adults. There were extremely violent individuals, drug addicts, prostitutes and people with suicidal tendencies throughout the whole programme. They tried to break you down and strip you of everything that you knew up to that point in your life to clean your own slate and rebuild your life and learn how to heal yourself. I was there for almost three years, from about 14 maybe up to 17.
“When I got in there, I came in with all these really crummy homemade tattoos, and one of the first things when I was allowed to go home for a couple of days a week, my parents – being the somewhat conservative, Southern, proper lady and gentleman that they were – wanted me to have the tattoos removed. Back in those days, it was very medieval. The guy that worked on me literally cut around these tattoos, almost filleted my skin away from the muscles, pulled it together tight and sewed it up. And I was a young kid, I wasn’t done growing yet. I was supposed to have three surgeries, but at the first one he took way too much skin out. And then the second surgery he did too early. I hadn’t healed enough, so the scars got worse, and after that I just I said, ‘The hell with it. I’m done.’
“Anyway, one of the things we had to do in the programme once a week was write an RSA, which stands for Rational Self-Analysis. You’d basically write out three major problems that were troubling you that week, and then three goals on how to overcome those obstacles. That was a game-changer. It was how I started expressing things. It started out where I was more or less forced to do it, but once I realised that I felt better for doing it, I started doing it on my own accord. Anyhow, Remedy is about that healing process, what it takes and what it feels like going through it and what it feels like overcoming it. It wasn’t pleasant revisiting that and writing that. It kind of messed me up.”