Songs on the album Lazaretto were inspired, in part, by short stories and plays written by White when he was 19 years old.] He found the writings in his attic and reworked them into new lyrics. ""Some of it's garbage, and I sort of laughed while I was reading it," he explained to Rolling Stone. "I was going to throw away a bunch of it, but I was just coming up with new styles of attacking songwriting for the album."
