"I Spent over 10 years trying to write this song. On the night I finally found the words, it felt like my last one."

I wrote Wrong End in one long stream of consciousness one night in mid-winter 2022, in the immediate lead-up to Russia’s full scale war on Ukraine - and as much as it feels like a goodbye to so many parts of myself, it’s really my goodbye to a world that is gone forever - a door that is now closed. From the very first songs I wrote for Balto, Russia and the times I spent there had become a simulacrum for my idealized self - a light socket to stick my finger in - an open, bipolar conduit - everything, all the time. I'd wander the broken sidewalks till dawn, notebook filled, heart big and pounding.

It was a different time, a brief thaw in the country's long backslide into dictatorship and violence. We used to go to this expat-run rock bar in Moscow called Crisis Genre - the owners had a band that played Britpop covers. When I came back for tour in 2016, it had been renamed “Lennon” - had a bootleg of one of his and Yoko's self-portraits on the door. In 2017, the last time I was in the city, it was gone. The mood was darker then, the screws tighter on the culture, and while I could sense an echo of that old liquid mercury feeling, the traces were faint. I rode the same train where I'd written the first Balto record, but the people were gone. I imagine Berlin between 1930 and 1943, steady decline, then horror, then darkness. I couldn't have known when I found the song that I was saying goodbye with that amount of finality. I will likely never go back. 

So as I pulled on those old threads and wandered deeper into the past, Rock'n'Roll became a unifying, universal form - God, hope, love, identity, place, memory, art - it breaks your heart and tears you apart to leave it but to live onwards demands it. The conclusion I came to at the end of that night was that letting go is always going to be a conscious, admittedly, false process - memory, like the body, will never truly heal - old narratives can be reinterpreted, but a badly broken knee will always limp. So 13 years later, I still get lost in the shadows - looking for some new, hidden meaning in the forgotten corners of my memory. But now that place, Russia, that ephemeral world - is gone. That self-obsessed all consuming love became religion, which became projection, which became a dream, which became scar tissue…

There is no triumph in this song, but there is relief.

- Daniel A Sheron