Songs
Songs from the world of Knew Downs. Each track comes with an essay.
Going and Gone
Jane is muted by her boss during a morning meeting. Her voice is literally switched off. With nothing left to say, she turns inward. She begins chanting Om to herself until she grows bored, then decides she has nothing left to do but write a poem.
Rewrite My Lines
The song begins in disorientation. The vocals enter without preamble near the start of the third chapter, right after Jane has been fired. The song marks the collapse of one identity before another has formed.
Learn To Be Funny
This song sits in a long tradition of philosophical reflection on why humans laugh and why laughter matters most when life becomes unbearable. Jane has just been expelled from the corporate machine. Her turn toward comedy is not escapism — it is a return to the living world.
Maybe (Ice, Ice, Maybe)
Jane has just started her first job and gets stuck in decision paralysis. The only known cure is to maintain a bias for action.
Threshold
Threshold is preceded by a scene that mirrors "Waiting for Godot." Jane is in a liminal state — moving from indifferent protocols into something more fully alive.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Jane has not been getting along with her boss and must decide which moral stance to take. The song transforms a workplace disagreement into a meditation on power, impermanence, and the moral weight of choice.
Thankful for Infinity
A moment of tonal release at the end of Chapter 9. The song redirects Jane away from conflict toward a wider aperture of thought, drawing on the physics and measurement of time.
Purlins and Concrete
Sung by Fabi, Jane's new boss, the song strips language down to its barest function — naming engineering elements with the cadence of a religious chant. The data center becomes a kind of monastery.
Reality's Illusion
At the end of Part One, Jane is in disbelief. Her boss has just confessed something deeply personal. The song is Jane's attempt to process what she has just heard — and what it means for her own identity.
Silicon Girl
Some people thought that cyberspace would loosen our embodied constraints and inherited identity categories. The prevalence of gendered violence online presents a stark disjunction from that utopian promise.
Deference
The song grows out of a card game of the same name. At its core, Deference is an attempt to recover the meaning of the word itself — knowing when to step aside, knowing when to let it ride.