Primer

Me & The Dear Hunter.
Hello hello hello. My name’s Callie, I like stories, and upon finding a juicy one in the Dear Hunter acts I’ve fallen into a pithole. Join me here in my adventures to excruciatingly wrest the images Casey Crescenzo, the author, has in his head, or in failing to glean a proper translation at least watch me poke the scenes that fascinate me with questions, questions, questions. Then what’s your two or ten cents? Does something fit? Does it not? Talk talk.

So starting, primer, what’s The Dear Hunter? What’s the deal? The Dear Hunter is a rock band that makes excellent music, largely to the purpose of telling the narrative story of the ‘acts’. “Telling a story through music? Like a musical?” No! Take a musical: what you’ll see is characters talk-talk-expositing, I am this, I think this, I feel this, tuneful ways for characters to communicate, but substitutable if you wished with plain acting and dialogue.

Now take one of those lyrics-heavy indie musicians, say in the territory of Eliott Smith or The Dismemberment Plan or rewinding a bit to Mr Bungle. We have characters, conflict, setting, a change in the character’s state between beginning and end, well then, are these not stories? In the same way that an illustrator picks up a brush or a novelist sets to a typewriter, a musician jolts to their instruments when they wish to translate a specific vision of a scene into something tangible for examination, observation, release, or enjoyment. In this personal creative language, a certain rhythm or melody flows downstream of an image or concept of a god or a mouse, or of love or of death, and capturing these concepts in the highest fidelity possible is the musician’s work. That’s how I’ll be approaching The Dear Hunter, as though reading a novel in sound. What is the storytelling purpose of so-and-so passage or lyric?

NOW, rewinding, what are the ‘acts’? They’re a series of five albums that form the narrative I’ll be reading, about the tribulations of a boy with an unpropitious birth and seemingly damned future. Notably, the narrative is not complete, as since its inception the story has always meant to be six acts, but the sixth is unreleased and Casey suggests that due to its ambitiousness, it may never be done. Further, even if he does finish it, it likely won’t be in the same format as the previous five acts, as albums. The absence of the sixth act means there may be passages of foreshadowing for it that currently can’t be interpreted, but the five existing acts are meaty enough that they’re worth chewing on anyway.

okay WARNING! Prolific spoilers from this point on. Everything below here assumes you’re broadly familiar with the story of The Dear Hunter, but if you’re not and would prefer to listen through the acts without my interpretations (or flat canon info) polluting your listen, now’s the time to tab out.

Still here? Alright sweet.

Aaand disclaimer that I’m not a musician. If I misuse or neglect to use certain technical terms, that’s why, please forgive and correct me.

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Act I | Act II | Act III | Act IV | Act V

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How to read The Dear Hunter acts?
Ok so how am I doing this.
Well I think there’s a few clues, or anchoring points, we can use when reading the songs that’ll help decipher Casey’s personal brain-language more than just going in blind. These are:

1. Look to More than the Lyrics.
   What the lyrics say is important, HOWEVER, equally and sometimes more important is the intonation with which they’re said. Intonation can denote a particular idea, a character’s perspective/emotional state, or the identity of a speaker. Equally, purely instrumental passages are vital: there are crucial plot events (for example, the death of Ms. Leading) that occur entirely through instrumentals, so they should not be relegated only to ‘background noise’ or ‘vibe’ or ‘transition’, but be factored as descriptions of scenes or places where very large and dramatic action can occur (or, y’know, small action).
   
   
2. Repetition.
   On that note, there’s a lot of repetition in the acts (as with any music, y’know, choruses), which oughtn’t be dismissed as… well, just the chorus. Repetition can be a sign that a character’s thoughts are stuck, or consistently returning to one idea, or that they’re repeatedly performing one action, as in Smiling Swine from Act 2. That song’s chorus is repeated incessantly, because Hunter cannot get his head out of the mindset of “:) 🙂 ❤ ❤ ❤ ms leading 🙂 🙂 😀 🙂 😀 😀 😀 :)”
   
   Moreover, looking at repetition, it’s useful to zero in on phrases or passages whose wording, intonation, or key is different the second time round. There’s a commonality to the scene, but something has changed between them, maybe the context, emotion, etc… equally, symbols that keep reappearing across different contexts are going to have some commonality.
   
   
3. Reprise.
   The acts have PLENTIFUL reprises, and every time they appear is a signal to pay attention. It means there’s some parallel (perhaps in an event, in an attitude, in an idea, in an emotion) between the scenes where the reprises occur, the consistencies of which are clues to what’s happening now, and the differences of which also are a clue to what’s happening now.
   
   Also I’m going to miss a ton of these.
   
   
4. Viewpoint.
   Whose head are we in for each song? This is an important thing to figure out before interpreting anything, because the implications of Hunter thinking something are a lot different from, say, Ms Leading thinking the same thing. Fortunately these have mostly been figured out or straight-up given by Casey, but a few are still hard to place (looking at you, Black Sandy Beaches).

Narrative Assumptions.
Here’s a few leaps of faith I’ll be making while reading the text. In your own interpretations, this is the first stuff to throw in the wastebin.

1. The characters don’t lie to you.
   Viewpoint characters (chiefly Hunter) might lie to themselves or be in denial, but there is no occasion where a character describes something they did not actually see or think. Taking the Act V Apparition as an example, the Apparition isn’t a real ‘thing’ since it’s a drug-induced hallucination, however, Hunter’s recount of seeing and hearing it is not a lie or metaphor. As far as it matters to him, it was literally there. I’m applying this idea to any other accounts where Hunter explicitly says he saw or did a thing (but not him meditating on his mental state). Maybe it’s a metaphor, but I’ll assume it’s probably not, or is literal with a metaphorical subtext.
   
   
2. The timeline is sequential.
   Events described in a song are the ‘present moment’ for the character — we’re not hearing them through a filter of the character’s hindsight. Instances of foreshadowing aren’t consciously put there by the character (unless the character is hinting at their present intentions), but Casey, who also speaks through the Oracles.

Sources of Interpretations.
Before starting this document, I’ve gone around to read as many interpretations of the acts/songs as I could find. From that, there’s a lot of ideas I’ve cobbled together from others’ speculation (and others I’ve decided to reject), which I’ll try to credit but sometimes can’t remember where I found them. In general, for community speculation, I’ve gone through the r/TheDearHunter reddit, genius annotations (careful here, these seem most liable to be misleading. I’m using genius as my lyric source too), the Dear Apparition podcast, Nick Weber’s readings (now inactive), and The Lake and the River forums. Other places I’ve scrounged for straight-up blurtings of canon from Casey include his twitter, the Dear Hunter twitter, and the Makey Words podcast. Then are the What It Means To Be Alone and Gloria music videos. I did say I fell into a hole, right.

Sources I won’t be using (first hand) are things from the Dear Hunter pillar (don’t have it), liner notes (don’t have ‘em), or the comics (same deal). Especially I’m leery to lean too heavily on the comics as the end-all-be-all to clarify things, though in some cases they certainly sound to, as the translation between Casey and the writers alongside between mediums, plus the difficulties of getting scripts down to a publishable size, probably left some stuff on the floor.

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The Cast.
Characters and how I’ll refer to them by order of first appearance.

Act 1:
– Hunter
Our protagonist, who has a lot of bad times, and some good ones.

– Ms. Terri
Hunter’s mother, a prostitute who worked at a brothel called the Dime, but who left it to raise Hunter in a better environment.

– The Pimp and the Priest (TP&P)
Our antagonist, a conman who is both the City’s beloved priest and the heinous pimp who runs the Dime.

Act 2:
– The Oracles
A group of mysterious figures who repeatedly warn Hunter of the mistakes he’s making, but Hunter doesn’t listen.

– Ms. Leading
A prostitute who works at the Dime, with whom Hunter has had a very up-and-down-and-up relationship.

Act 3:
– The Tank
It’s a merciless tank that slaughters Hunter’s battalion in WW1. Casey says this is a character, very well.

– The Poison Woman
A woman Hunter meets during WW1 who invites people to drinks, which she laces with fatal poison.

– The Thief (Pierre)
A man Hunter meets during WW1, who graverobs dead soldiers.

– Mustard Gassers
A group of enemy soldiers Hunter encounters during WW1 who almost kill him with mustard gas.

– The Son
Hunter’s long-lost half-brother (or more…?) who saves Hunter in WW1, but later dies in the war. Hunter, desperate to escape his past, steals the Son’s identity for himself going home, as they look alike.

– The General
Hunter’s long-lost father who he meets during WW1, only for him to proudly recount how he abused Ms. Terri.

Act 4:
– The Mother
The General’s wife and The Son’s mother, who Hunter lives with for a time under the guise of The Son.

– The Friends
Friends of the Son, who Hunter deceives while living under the guise of The Son.

– The Wife
The fiancee of The Son who Hunter later marries, again under the guise of The Son.

Act 5:
– The Apparition
An opium-induced hallucination of Hunter’s childhood self, who encourages Hunter to reclaim his true identity.

– Mr. Usher
A powerful and exquisitely villainous ex-politician who plots to take The City for himself, playing Hunter and TP&P against each other to that end.

– Hunter’s Son
The son that Hunter has with The Wife, both of whom Hunter sends away to live in a better environment.