Present Day, July 4, 2026
Some listeners will hear Holy War and experience it as a historical document, a meditation on something that happened in other centuries to other people. I understand why. History provides distance. Distance provides comfort.
I am writing this on July 4, 2026, thirteen days before Sanctified Hunger releases. A general is still describing an active military conflict as a holy war to bring about the second coming. The statement has not been retracted. The conflict continues.
I want to be precise about what Holy War is and is not. It is not a polemic. I did not write it to tell anyone what to think about religion or about this specific conflict or about the relationship between faith and violence. I wrote it because I have been watching this precise configuration of language and violence for five centuries and I have a specific kind of knowledge about what it produces, not as opinion but as accumulated direct observation.
The song is built the way I build all documentation: cold, precise, without pushing the listener toward a predetermined emotional response. The arrangement does not tell you how to feel. It gives you the structure and lets the structure do the work. Whether that work is comfortable or disturbing depends on where you are standing when you hear it.
What I can tell you is that I am not standing at a comfortable distance. I have never been able to find that distance. That is the cost of being what I am. July 17.