melancholy
I don’t know if Barlow’s right or not. It’ll come out eventually, one way or the other. What I do know is that once, about 9 years ago, I went out for beers with Spalding Grey and some friends after he’d performed at my college, and then walked him back to the hotel he was staying at. He was a melancholy man, his back bent from years and years of looking into his own navel – extracting his life by open-pit mining it – and he seemed detached from what was going on around him, even though he had to be looking for the next stories to tell, all the time.