Paranoid Style – Tearing The Ticket
New Paranoid Style single “Tearing the Ticket”—featuring Matt Douglas from the Mountain Goats— pays tribute to lost DC-area music legends Danny Gatton and Roy Buchanan, and wrestles with the ghosts of the past amidst a flickering future.
“It was 1994 and I was in Arizona playing a gig and someone told me that Danny Gatton had died. This was a hard one because he was my guy. I had seen him perform a few years prior when I was a freshman at the Berklee School of Music in Boston and it was obvious he was beyond brilliant. He just owned that instrument. He was the kind of guitar player that made you want to be better or give up, and believe me, once I saw him, I thought about both. Then when I learned that he had killed himself—that he had shot himself and he was only 49 years old—the first thing I thought, selfishly, was “Well, I don’t get it! He could play like Danny Gatton!”
Those are the reflections of Eugene Edwards, a Gatton disciple who is now Dwight Yoakam’s lead guitarist. Gatton, and his fellow DMV guitar-genius Roy Buchanan, who took his life in 1988, at the age of 48, are at the heart of the first single from the Paranoid Style’s fifth LP Known Associates—one part funeral march and one part valedictory commitment to carry on.
“Washington DC is the place you go for action.” Nelson sings. “But we lost Roy Buchanan/ And we lost Danny Gatton.”
Edwards, alongside Elizabeth Nelson’s usual Paranoid Style lineup of Peter Holsapple, William Matheny, Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Jon Langmead and Timothy Bracy, is a guest on Known Associates, the exhilarating follow up to their acclaimed 2024 ten-alarm panic attack The Interrogator. Among other guests is Matt Douglas, the multi-instrumentalist from the Mountain Goats, who provides the keening saxophone and flute on “Tearing the Ticket,” the Springsteen-meets-X-Ray-Spex examination of a hard, long life lived in music and dedicated to Bar/None’s recently deceased and terribly missed longtime label manager Mark Lipsitz.
In addition to being the singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, Elizabeth Nelson is also a decorated journalist and a contributor to the New York Times, the Washington Post. the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Pitchfork. Recently, she authored the liner notes for the just announced reissue of the Replacements classic Let It Be. “Tearing The Ticket” is the first single from the fifth Paranoid Style Known Associates, to be released in early 2026, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of Bar/None! More info about Known Associates is soon to come – watch this space!
Equal parts ebullient statement of purpose and hard-won elegy, “Tearing the Ticket” starts and ends with the Robert Hunter-worthy koan: “Strolling through the minefield/ Rolling up the stone/ The one thing that they tell you/ Is the one thing you shoulda known.” Sometimes a stained glass window just needs breaking. Sometimes the ticket just needs tearing.
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