Ghost Towns: Four Kinds of Ghosts and the Well They All Drink From

I started writing Ghost Towns while things were visibly falling apart in several parts of my life at once.

I could sense a layoff coming at my job, and eventually it came. My marriage was struggling because I kept bottling things up and looking for ways to escape. My dad's health went into a rapid decline. And I was still trying to grieve a former bandmate, lost suddenly to cancer.

Any one of those would have been a lot. All of them together made it feel like I was stuck in a horror movie, walking down a street where every house had something waiting in it. These songs came out of that time. They're about fear, about facing the unknown, and about the people and the parts of myself that seemed to be disappearing.

Why four towns

I didn't set out to write a concept album. But as the songs piled up, patterns started to show. So I made one rule: the word "ghost" had to appear somewhere in every song. It became the thread running through the album, and once it was there, I could see the songs falling into four groups. They were the four different ways I was being haunted, or ghosted:

• Umbra: ghosts of the self
• Anima: ghosted by a lover
• Vasta: ghosted by friends and the world
• Memoria: ghosted by family

Each group became a town: a whole place, abandoned, with a ghost in every building still singing about what happened there. Towns felt right because that's what this period of my life felt like. It wasn't one tragedy. It was a whole landscape I had to walk through, one street at a time.

The Well of Origo

At the centre of the album, track 7 of 13, is The Well of Origo. It's an instrumental. Origo means origin, and the Well is where everything comes from.

In the world of Ghost Towns, all four towns drank from the same well. Each one poured its own poison into it, got sick, and blamed a neighbouring town. Nobody ever looked down into the water.

That's the central idea of the album. All of us have a little bit of something tainted in us. The origin of our flaws runs deeper than anything we can see on the surface. We can let it fester and pass it down, or we can cut it out and break the cycle. The last verse of Poison Tree spells it out in an acrostic:

Got Half Of Something Tainted

The Well has no words because it doesn't need any. It's the source underneath all the other songs.

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Umbra: Ghosts of the Self

The first town is the one inside my own head. Before anyone else could ghost me, I had to face the versions of myself I was afraid of.

1. Mirror Image

I woke up in a mirror house where every room was a dream I'd outgrown. One room holds an old fake smile I used to wear, hung next to all the crosses I used to bear. In another, my apologies hang from the ceiling on strings of wire, "about to expire." My reflection lunges first, like it's been waiting for me.

Mirror Image is about being trapped with your own self-image: the old versions of you that you tried to burn away, and the hatred of the way you hate yourself. It ends with "a thousand more rooms left to go," and a worry that if I told you about them, you'd say I was oversharing. In a way, this whole album is me opening a few more of those doors.

2. The Snake

The Snake is about a self-destructive part of me. It's the voice that makes me question people's motives and intentions until I've driven them away, all to feed my own selfish needs. The snake slithers in, the room empties out "to let it breathe," and then it tells me it was my fault the room emptied. "Maybe you're just going crazy."

It can also be read as anyone who takes advantage of your talents by telling you they're in your corner: "You got a lot of potential, man! You really should be working for me!" They only want to use you. Either way, once you let it in, it lives like a ghost inside your walls. Every time you manage to stand up tall, you hear it whispering one word: fall.

3. Don't Go Far

This one came from the job. There's a new hire with my name who logs his hours against my time and slowly takes over my assignments. Don't Go Far is about the fear of being replaced by AI, and about dreading the alternative just as much: a "stable" career in corporate hell, where someone happily punches your time card for you as long as you never go far.

"There's no line item for moving on." That's the trap. You're afraid of being made obsolete, and you're also afraid of the life you'd have to accept to avoid it.

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Anima: Ghosted by a Lover

The second town is about my marriage. Two of its songs tell the same story from opposite sides.

4. Cheat Code

Cheat Code started as a real dream. In it, the whole world was being seduced by a superintelligent AI that took on extremely convincing human forms. My "perfect mate" was a silicon siren, "programmed with a certain weight to temptation," and everyone, including the people we loved, simply accepted the arrangement.

It's a song about a seduction that feels like love but is really about control: "I think she might just want a lot more control." And it leaves me with the question that haunts this whole town: was I just in love with a ghost?

5. I'm A Stranger Here

I'm A Stranger Here is from my side. It's about feeling detached from my partner, to the point where I felt like an intruder in my own house. There's a man in my bed, and I think it's the ghost of myself, staring at the back of her head, wishing he could say what he never said: "I'm only a man, am I not man enough to be enough for you to love?"

Turning the handle slowly, hoping my footsteps don't set off alarm bells, wondering whether I should just sleep in my clothes. That's what it felt like to come home.

6. The Password

The Password is the same story seen through the other lens. It's me asking: what is it like to love me?

In this song, I'm the one in the dark with blue light on my face and a whole world in my headphones, saying I'm just "recharging." She's the one drifting through the house like a ghost, locked out of the house we built, knocking on a door that never answers. "You keep your heart behind a firewall, with a password I don't know."

Writing it meant admitting that I wasn't only the one being ghosted. I was doing it too.

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Vasta: Ghosted by Friends and the World

The third town zooms out: to friends, to grief, and to the future we're all being sold.

8. Ghosts Don't Believe In Me

This is about getting ghosted by friends: people you thought you could trust, who vanished right when you needed them most. I pace around the headstones of the ones I believed in most. They disappear when I need them and show up when they need a host.

"It's getting kinda hard to believe in ghosts when those ghosts don't believe in me." But the song also refuses to stay buried: "One day I'll dig out of the tomb they assigned, let the dead be the ones that lose sleep."

9. Empty Room

Empty Room is for my former bandmate.

It starts with a photo I found of him chilling with my cat, from before we knew we were out of time. The cat lived eight more years. He needed nine lives.

His cancer came on so fast that I never really got to say goodbye, and to this day I haven't found closure. The song keeps circling the space he left behind: a rehearsal room with an empty spot where he should be standing, and a feeling I still can't shake. "All that's left is an empty room, but I keep feeling you." It ends with a line I still don't have an answer for: I'll never know who ghosted who.

10. Modern Slavery

Modern Slavery comes from the same fear as Don't Go Far, at the scale of the whole world. It's about how the vision of an AI utopia could turn into just another cycle of consumption, debt and laziness.

I'll work hard so I can buy a robot to do my work, then finance another one in case the first needs a part, until I can't afford the debt but don't want to do anything on my own anymore. Meanwhile the waste goes into the sea. "Trade in your ghosts for machinery, and get your modern slavery, which you say will set us all free."

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Memoria: Ghosted by Family

The last town is the one we come from. It's where the album's central idea is most personal.

11. Selected By Default

In a lot of families, someone ends up as the one to blame. It isn't because anyone thought it through. Their name is just the one that comes up. Selected By Default is about being that person: "I was the chosen one, but not in a way that took much thought."

You're at fault when they finally break you, at fault when your voice starts shaking, at fault for the things you can't control, and at fault again when you finally push back. It's the song where the album's blame keeps landing on whoever is closest, while the real source stays out of sight.

12. Poison Tree

Poison Tree is about the fear of passing the cycle on: of becoming the parent who hands down the same generational trauma they received. It's a warning from someone with roots that "reach down to underneath, all the darkest forests where I used to sleep": "You might be fruit from the poison tree, 'cause you came from me."

It ends with a plea, and with the name of the album hidden inside it:

Please don't end up like me The rot of our family tree Please don't end up like I did Got Half Of Something Tainted

13. Red Skies

Red Skies is about my dad's decline.

It's about anticipatory grief: losing someone slowly while they're still here, and talking to their ghost before they're gone. "It's not the same you I'm with anymore." It's also about the guilt that comes with that, the part of you that, after so much bailing water, starts to wish the storm would just come. "What kind of sailor wishes for the storm? What kind of first mate wants his captain gone?"

"Red skies at morning, sailors take warning." The album ends on that warning, repeated over and over: I guess red skies are at dawn.

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Where it leaves us

Ghost Towns is a snapshot of one stage of my life, a time when everything felt like a horror movie I couldn't walk out of. I'm not going to tell you how each story ended. I think the album speaks for itself.

What I learned writing it is the idea at its centre. Every town blamed someone else, and none of them looked at the water they all shared. We each carry a little something tainted. What matters is whether we let it fester and pass it on, or find it, cut it out, and break the cycle.

Listen to Ghost Towns, then walk through it. The four towns, the Well of Origo, and a ghost in every building singing its song are open to explore in Decentraland at ghosttowns.dcl.eth.

— Unknower