All of This and Nothing: Dr. Bill

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

I'm back to Obscure this week with Dr. Bill, a 2011 song from a band called 13ghosts. This is probably the first song of theirs I heard, and it got me to buy one full-length and an EP. I didn't like anything else of theirs quite as much as this one song, but there was some good stuff. And that's the way it goes, isn't it?

This is a ominous, noisy, compelling song, focused tightly on the singer's voice and the things he's telling us.

Well, maybe the things he's trying to convince himself of, if we're honest.

I like the instrumentation here, the way it starts with that slow, walking beat, punctuated with emphatic guitar chords and timed out with the spare, mostly single-hit drum sounds. Then the singer comes in, and the music builds slowly behind him - the drumming gets more complex, an electric guitar with a slightly more soothing sound to start out with, but then it all goes on, a little tenser each verse. 

I'm very normal
I'm very like everyone else

The singer is visiting Dr. Bill, we think. Some kind of regular checkup. And the singer is protesting, we think, that he shouldn't be there, that he doesn't need this, that there's absolutely nothing wrong with him.

We might even believe him, at first.

I've got it all
Nine days a week
I never sleep, I never eat
I'm a real breadwinner, a real go-get-her

But he definitely protests too much. We've probably done that ourselves. Everything is completely normal. There's nothing wrong with him. There's nothing wrong with us.

There are no voices in my head
Everything I hear is real
There are no monsters in my bed
Everything I dreamed is dead

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 28, 2026

I got one book from the library this week, and, continuing the theme from last week, it is physically larger than I expected. I'm getting much more of an upper-body workout from my books lately than expected.

That book is the most recent graphic novel by Peter Kuper: Insectopolis: A Natural History. As best I can tell, it's a pop-science book in comics form telling the history of the vast phylum of Arthropoda. (OK, I'm cheating slightly. I was hoping Insects would have their own Kingdom, but they don't - they're Animalia like most of us. And Arthopodia includes things that aren't insects, who all sit within the Class Insecta. But that isn't nearly as much fun to type out.)

The big deal here, for anyone not aware, is that insects are dying out in vast numbers, due to human activity, over the past few decades. And they are an important base level to a lot of ecosystems, which means the extinction of various insect species is A Bad Sign. Kuper has never been the most positive storyteller - he always seems to gravitate to things that are broken, lost, or horrible in various ways - so I expect this will be depressing in multiple ways.