In the Blood

There’s a song on the record called "In the Blood." I can’t think of another one of my songs that more distinctly affects people—where you could put it on and no matter what kind of music you like, no matter your philosophy, you’d still say, “I have to hear that again.” It’s really big and when I say that, I’ll never mean commercial. I mean people will want to talk to me about it and people will say they felt something there. I think I have a very big fish with it.

what song are you most proud of on your album?

“In The Blood.” You’ll hear it.

TS: So you said that a song has to make you feel something or hurt. Which one on The Search For Everything makes you feel the most?

JM: Oh, "In The Blood."

TS: Oh, good, I'm glad. I wanna talk about that one. Tell me about it.

JM: I won't talk too much about it ever, for some reason. I guess I made a deal with myself that if I was gonna go that honest on a song, I wasn't gonna necessarily be a liability to it and color it in. But suffice to say that when I heard that one come back, it was like, holy — had a fist in the air.

TS: When you're writing, you're just trying to hear a part of yourself that you can identify — identify itself to you. When I listened to that back, it was like an anthem for me, about me, and I went — I just had a fist in the air for any time it would play, I'd just be like — there it is.

JM: Yeah, but I don't want that to be heard by somebody as pride, [as if] there's a lot of hubris in this song. "In The Blood" is like a pleading — a pleading or reckoning or wondering if you can be the person that you want to be.

It's turning around and pointing at yourself and going "What's in there?" It's a certain time in your life where you just want to turn yourself upside down and shake everything out and go, "Where's the loose change? What is in here?"

Like, can I put "In The Blood" on my next record again? You should be able to re-rack a song if you think it was better than people thought at the moment, and be like, give me another shot. That would be so cool if you were allowed to put, like, an old track on the next record, being like, let's try that again everybody. Cause that shit was great, and ya missed it. Ya dang missed it.