The Troll

How It Started and How It's Going

New song out - June 20th, 2025
Pre-Saves are odd but still, do it Here

I feel compelled to share some contextual backstory of the song, given the confrontational lyric. There’s a full length album written around it, and the song was written solely because I didn’t know how not to. On Greendale’s Falling From Above Neil Young wrote “When I was young, people wore what they had on”. This new song (and album) is me living that line out loud. The night The Troll was penned, I was wearing what I had on. You’ll get my meaning, I think.

The Story

I’m loath to admit that The Troll’s bullshit finally got to me.

After years of sticking to the playbook and brushing off twisted, incessant comments and unhinged messages, I felt a sickening snap. Had I been face to face with The Troll in that moment, I’m unsure how I would have avoided some measure of regret. A dam one crack over the line is a dam no more. Violent thoughts were suddenly rushing downriver, gathering jagged debris, wild and unabated. The white hot grief of loss was blinding, the force of which I had no real chance at reasoning with for many days hence.

Just a few days had passed since we had lost Seamus, our 5 month old son. We had fought for his life as fiercely as we could, but there was no cure. Many kind folks had been following along, sharing words of sympathy and encouragement, hoping along with us that we’d get some kind of win.

All but one.

I’ll rewind a few years. It started with a vague, schoolyard type threat, in response to support I had shown for an artist acquaintance that was exercising her right to protest peacefully.

From there, it remained mildly annoying but mostly harmless. In those early days I did respond, but it was already more than a little obvious this person wasn’t cooking with any oil in the pan, so to speak. This was in response to a small outdoor concert we hosted in our back yard.

We even covered more standard conspiracy debate fare, which turned pretty quickly away from the scintillating subject matter and toward personal insults.

You’ll notice that each new transmission is a different account name, while the poor grammar, spelling, and syntax are all undeniably similar. I’d block and report each new account, but before too long another one would grow, wart-like in its place. The pattern became familiar and annoying, and began to feel obsessive and worrisome. This was 2020, and an alarming number of people seemed to be slipping towards madness. I made the decision to stop responding, hoping to starve the troll of oxygen.

One morning I walked out to the driveway to get something out of my wife’s car. On the ground next to the driver’s door was a bullet, placed on its end. It was difficult to believe this was anything but deliberate, so we alerted the sheriff’s office. They sent a deputy who listened, took the bullet, and ostensibly filed some kind of report. We had our suspicions about who put it there, but no real proof.

I took a long social break. My father passed. I got married. We started a family. I hadn’t thought about The Troll for a long time. As soon as Seamus arrived, many of our waking moments were critical. We wouldn’t find out for months what was really going on, and in those early days we were wracked with stress and worry. A group of friends started a GoFundMe account for our family, and I wrote frequently with detailed updates. Our story was widely shared, and hundreds of friends and strangers donated and/or shared kind words of encouragement. It was a beautiful showing of community benevolence, and it was more than a little comfort while we navigated an impossibly difficult situation. For a beautiful but achingly short moment in time, we finally returned home with our boy. While we had so much to learn about caring for a special needs child, we were also determined to support each other’s normal activities.

And then, The Troll returned.

After a 7 month delay, a shipment of vinyl records of my album had finally arrived. one One relatively calm afternoon as Seamus and Daron were resting together in the house, I decided to spend an hour or so in the studio to announce they were finally here by making a reel of me unboxing the records. I thought maybe I could start fulfilling some long overdue pre-orders.

I remember thinking “so fucking goddamn rude” as I reported and blocked the new account. I didn’t care about the bogus money claim, but the vaccine thing irked me. How dare you claim to know what was wrong with my child and then in the same breath ask what’s wrong with ME? I felt disgusted, and so annoyed she was back. I didn’t yet have proof The Troll was a woman, but the first account used the name lindajennings1972. We just always called The Troll Linda.

It wasn’t long after that when Seamus nearly died the first time, sending us back into the world of NICU for months. The Troll doubled and tripled down all the while, soon alluding to the presence of multiple trolls.

Still, I refrained from responding. I grew more frustrated with every new comment, but things were getting so real in our life that I didn’t have any time to linger on hard feelings. I needed to love my family as hard as I could, and I couldn’t do that if I gave in to anger or whatever else bubbled up.

Thanks to the incredible neurological team at Children’s Hospital Orange County, we finally learned enough about Seamus’ condition to know that his chances of a normal life were essentially nil. His chances of surviving beyond infancy were slim, even with the best treatments available. It’s extremely rare that a baby is born with this condition, but it isn’t necessarily unheard of. Why it happens remains a mystery, even to the best of the best in medicine. I can tell you for sure what I do know - it hurt so bad to watch helplessly while our otherwise perfect first born son struggled to live. It hurt so much worse when he died.

The Troll was unrelenting.

So when I read these last two transmissions after having watched Seamus’s body ride off in the back of a hearse, I admit that I fancied the thought of challenging her to a duel. Clint Eastwood, Man With No Name style. I’d walk into the middle of town and calmly ask her if she felt lucky before calling for a draw and cutting her down. I may be mixing up my movies.

OBVIOUSLY not an acceptable move anymore but… I could write a song about a hypothetical someone who would.

I shared the phone recording that night with a few friends that were aware of the situation, and for a very brief moment I felt a little calmer. It was many moons and subsequent trollings later when I received a most interesting dm from someone claiming to know The Troll’s identity. After a little research of my own to confirm, it turned out the offender is indeed a local woman; a known sycophant of the soulless far-right looney bin. I felt relieved, yes—there was no apparent threat, and this was not the messenger of some larger cabal of haters, at least here in town—but I felt a surprising measure of sadness too, knowing that this is the way scores of people are spending their lives now. Trolling. What a fucking waste. I tried to feel some pity, but admittedly that proved extraordinarily difficult. I wrote to her and asked in a firm, unpleasant tone to stop contacting us. So far that’s seemed to work, at least for us. Apparently she’s still at it, and has merely pointed her vitriolic hose elsewhere.

So yeah, for a time it was calm.

Then one morning, The Neighbor fired up the loudest motorcycle anyone has ever heard and began a neighborhood wide reign of noise terror… and again I did the only thing I could do.

Until next time…

B