“Brush Me Like a Horse is an acid western about a man condemned to die in a cruel, humiliating public spectacle. Joe Newman came to me with the vivid image of a state execution via treadmill, and it immediately conjured this whole narrative world. In Joe’s song writing, the images are layered and nested inside one another: a man is accused, the accused is a horse, the horse is a mouse in a field where cats roam. The track already contained multiple voices and characters; it cut so many strong silhouettes that my job was simply to fill them in.” Alex Takacs, director