“Old Death is, like the rest of the album, sort of a sequel to The Meadowlands before it and like that one, is about time, how one chooses to spend it, what those choices cost. That means for me, the song (and album) is also about making the album itself. It’s about death, maybe obviously, but it’s really about my dumb life. And because so much of that life lined up weirdly well to the Odyssey, it’s all sorta hung on Homer’s narrative framework (while unlike say, Ulysses, in my case it’s all very non-fictional/auto-biographical). However like Ulysses, every song is written in a stream-of-consciousness mode. Or for me, really more of a stream-of-memories: that time this happened, that other-time-this-reminds-me-of happened etc. Hence, the parenthetical dating throughout the lyrics as those memories pop in & out. So basically like, unlike, like and then unlike Ulysses-ha.
https://pitchfork.com/news/car-colors-new-project-from-the-wrens-charles-bissell-shares-first-song-old-death-listen
