On Post: Something New

Date: January 18, 2014

The image of a man with blood on his fists which elicited a connection to boxing in my mind.

The problem is I can’t really write about boxing. I just don’t know enough about it to write about the sport in a way that would feel accurate and interesting. Still, I kept with it and got to thinking about why he might have blood on his hands. Maybe he killed someone in the ring?

From there, “Sledgehammer” began to take shape. I wanted him to be distinctive, resembling Tyson’s early life story but going in a very different direction from there. I wanted him to not “be the type” that someone might expect as the kind of boxer who might kill in the ring to give the whole thing an even thicker air of tragedy.

The song’s title gave me the idea to go ironic (in reference to it) and instead make this not at all something new for our boxer-philosopher and, thus, this was his second victim in the ring.

As I “built” Robbie Lee Stone in my head, I realized I was thinking of him in the same tone as a newspaper or magazine sports profile. Since I was already in that mode, it just made sense to go ahead and carry that out in full and make the whole thing a profile piece grounded in a recent event. That’s where everything came together.