Portland band share the haunting piano ballad “Dilaudid Diane” as the first single from the record.

The Delines were finishing the recording session for our last record, Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, when I brought in a tune called ‘Walking With His Sleeves Down’. Amy learned it on piano and we recorded it live. Her take was stunning but the song didn’t quite fit with the record. It was lonelier, more rattled, and it missed that rudderless romance that inhabits the world of Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, so we set it aside.

Next I brought in ‘The Meter Keeps Ticking’, a companion song to ‘JP and Me’. It’s the tale of a woman visiting her grifter husband in a mental hospital and realizing he doesn’t want to leave. It was a band favourite, we recorded it, but again it didn’t have that reckless romance that the other tracks seemed to have. So it too was set aside.

Stream ‘The meter keeps ticking’ here

And then finally, right before we began mixing Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, I brought in a version of ‘The Reckless Life’. The song worked sonically but again it didn’t feel quite right lyrically. There was a lonely desperation to it and the other two tunes I just mentioned. I realized I was writing songs in the same world as Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, but from a different angle. The three tracks pulled the listener into the lives of the drug-addled, the grifters, and the lost, and not the romantics adrift on the road like Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom.

When Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom came out I still couldn’t stop writing sister songs to it. I think seeing the residue of the opioid epidemic in the US — the thousands of young people lost to addiction and living in tents and on the streets and in old cars and RVs — influenced Mr. Luck & Ms. Doom, but it’s even more pronounced in The Set Up. ‘Dilaudid Diane’, ‘The Reckless Life’, ‘Jumping off in Madras’, and ‘Walking With His Sleeves Down’ all live in that world.

Stream ‘The setup’ here