Wolves, Wolves, Wolves

Track four takes the single gatekeeper from the last song and shows you the whole industry he belongs to. There's a list of names floating around. There's a new wolf every week. And the first verse does something clever - it walks the decades by their technologies. In the eighties they had pamphlets. In the nineties, talk radio. The two-thousands had blogs. Two thousand twenty they had podcasts, Substacks, Twitter accounts. The platform keeps updating. The move never changes. Every man a watchman. Every man with the alarm.

The sharpest verse is the contrast. The men on the list are mostly preachers. The men with the list are mostly nobody. The cataloguers never planted a church, never raised a family, never preached to a pew of broken people. They were never in the field. They were always in the watchtower with the binoculars and the camera and the brand. Calling a wolf became a paying job, and subscribers want a fresh target every week.

And then the song does the thing it was built to do - it inverts the word. Christ never called the prophets wolves. Christ called the gatekeepers wolves. The men in sheep's clothing were inside the gate, not outside it. The whitewashed tombs, the serpents - those were the watchmen. The bridge lands it: Christ drove the watchmen out of the temple, not the publicans, not the harlots. The men they would have flagged were the men He sat down with. The alarm was never about the wolves. The alarm was the wolves' own howl.