I came across a short clip from a recent podcast where Quentin Tarantino shares an opinion about Paul Dano’s performance in There Will Be Blood.

His point isn’t that Dano is a bad actor, but that the role called for someone operating at the same level as Daniel Day-Lewis. In his framing, it’s more about balance and presence than talent.

On its own, the thought doesn’t feel especially charged. It sounds like a private judgment, the kind of preference or irritation a director might carry without much consequence. I can imagine it being meaningful for him as a filmmaker, a way of articulating his own sense of cinematic precision.

If it had remained an internal thought, it could have stayed lightweight.
A personal standard.
A passing aesthetic reaction.
Something provisional.

Once spoken publicly, it changes character.

It stops being only a thought and becomes a social event. The remark circulates, gets replayed, defended, criticized, contextualized. Ethan Hawke responds by protecting Dano. Joe Rogan weighs in. Viewers align, disagree, joke, take sides, or simply absorb the exchange as entertainment.

A small, subjective preference turns into a brief cultural current.

None of this feels dramatic. It’s closer to a ripple than a scandal.
What interests me is the transition itself, the moment a private perception becomes a shared signal.

Inside someone’s mind, a thought like this can feel harmless, even playful. It can exist without consequence, without obligation, without narrative weight. Once released into a public space, it starts to carry effects that no longer belong solely to its author.

That doesn’t make the original thought wrong.
It just means it has entered a different ecosystem.

Tarantino has suggested that he didn’t intend the comment as an attack, and that seems plausible. Intent, though, doesn’t cancel impact. Both can exist at the same time: a thought can feel harmless internally while producing reactions externally.

What follows, the defenses, the agreements, the debates, the memes, isn’t really about resolving whether the opinion is correct. It functions more like a temporary regulatory loop. People orient themselves, express taste, affirm identity, perform affiliation, or simply participate in the movement of attention.

I don’t feel offended by the comment. I can even find it mildly interesting. I like Tarantino’s films. I’m not particularly invested in Dano’s reputation. The exchange doesn’t demand that I take a side.

What it makes visible, instead, is how easily a single remark can become a small organizing force, not because it matters deeply, but because public conversation often serves as a way of stabilizing moods, identities, and social rhythms.

The comment didn’t have to exist.
It didn’t have to not exist either.
It exists now, and it’s doing what public comments tend to do: circulating, generating reactions, and eventually fading.

I’m less interested in judging whether it was right or wrong, and more interested in noticing how such moments operate, how a private thought, once externalized, becomes part of a shared noise that people can choose to engage with, ignore, or simply observe.

I discovered The Soft Parade without knowing its story.

I didn’t grow up with the Doors, and I didn’t encounter the album as a “problem record.” I first listened to it closely years later, on vinyl, during a period of forced stillness. I wasn’t aware that it was supposed to represent a decline, a misstep, or an apology. I simply heard a record.

And it sounded alive.

What stood out wasn’t provocation or novelty, but openness. The album didn’t insist on a single identity. It moved freely: lighter at times, ceremonial at others, occasionally awkward, often generous. It felt less like a declaration and more like an allowance, as if the band had momentarily loosened its grip on what it was supposed to be.

That quality is rare. And for someone who makes things, it’s deeply inspiring.

Only later did I encounter the narrative that has surrounded the album since its release: the critical disappointment, the talk of excess, the idea that this was where the Doors lost their way before correcting course. Over time, that story hardened into consensus, repeated, refined, and eventually institutionalized.

A recent Apple Music retrospective text is a good example of how this history is now written. The album is framed as a product of exhaustion and overextension, contrasted with figures from “rock’s vanguard” who had allegedly withdrawn from touring to focus on studio work, most notably Brian Wilson. The implication is clear: retreat equals artistic health; continuation equals decline.

But this comparison quietly inverts reality.

Brian Wilson’s withdrawal during the Smile period was not a sign of creative clarity or healthy focus. It was the result of a profound psychological collapse. Smile was not delayed because it was too pure for the world; it was abandoned because its creator could not complete it. Its later mythologization has softened that fact, but it does not change it.

By contrast, The Soft Parade was finished. It was released. It contained a major hit. It coheres. It functions musically. Listening now, it does not sound like a band losing its mind. It sounds like a band loosening its boundaries.

To frame Wilson as the healthy counterexample and the Doors as the unhealthy case is not just inaccurate, it’s an inversion produced by myth.

The same Apple Music text leans heavily on contemporaneous criticism, especially from Rolling Stone, quoting Alec Dubro’s infamous dismissal about “limp wicks waving in the Miami breeze.” In its original context, that review is understandable. It was written inside a live cultural moment, under pressure, amid real tensions about authenticity, seriousness, and direction. Critics then were not neutral archivists; they were participants in a battle over meaning.

What’s harder to understand is why that language is still being repeated today, decades later, with so little reflection.

The album’s reputation was further sealed by the band’s own retreat. After The Soft Parade, the Doors moved decisively toward a back-to-basics sound on Morrison Hotel. That record is strong and needs no apology. But its placement, immediately following The Soft Parade, unintentionally framed the earlier album as a mistake in need of correction.

That framing mattered even more because Jim Morrison himself internalized it. In later interviews, Morrison spoke apologetically about the album, distancing himself from it and questioning its legitimacy. Under enormous pressure, young, already struggling with alcohol, he doubted himself. He accepted the idea that perhaps he had strayed from who he “really” was.

In hindsight, that doubt looks less like insight and more like narrowing.

Listening now, far from the moment of crisis, the album doesn’t carry the sickness it was accused of. It carries something else entirely: permission. It suggests that the next move does not have to be a correction, that identity does not have to harden under scrutiny, that seriousness is not the only measure of truth.

What history treated as indulgence feels more like breadth. What was dismissed as dilution sounds like curiosity. And what was framed as a dead end reveals itself as a possible exit, one that simply wasn’t taken.

The tragedy, if there is one, isn’t that the Doors made The Soft Parade. It’s that the door it opened was closed so quickly, and then sealed by repetition.

Today, with no careers at stake and no myths left to defend, it’s possible to listen again without urgency. And listening again changes things. The orchestration is no longer a provocation. The stylistic shifts are no longer a threat. They’re just part of the album’s movement.

This isn’t an attempt to overturn history or to declare the album secretly misunderstood. It’s simply an acknowledgment that the story we inherited is narrower than the music itself.

Some records don’t age into consensus. They age into availability.

The Soft Parade feels like one of those records, not because it was ahead of its time, but because it quietly refused to close the future.

And sometimes, that refusal is the most honest thing a work of art can offer.

Zoe Rainbow Days was recorded in Santa Ana in September and October 2025.

Some of the songs were written earlier, before I had any sense of how the following months would unfold. Others were written during that period. The album came together quickly, without much distance or reflection. Because of that, the songs don’t process what was happening so much as they sit just before it.

The record still belongs partly to an earlier continuity. By the time it was released, that continuity was already breaking, but not enough time had passed for it to fully register in the music.

The cover was drawn by hand with my daughter Zoe, and the album is dedicated to her. Working on it was a way of keeping something intact during a time when I wasn’t speaking to many people and was largely on my own. Music was the one line of continuity that didn’t depend on anyone else.

This album wasn’t made to explain anything or to mark a turning point. It simply existed, and stayed together. Looking back, that feels like its function.