“Cicadas spend the vast majority of their seventeen-year life cycles underground. They chew on roots for the better part of two decades, crawl up trees, Cronenberg/Kafka into enormous flies, tear out of their alien shells, scream for two months, and die. I guess cicada days could either be a long time spent growing but not emerging, or they could be days spent struggling to become something new that doesn’t quite pan out so great, or they could be the two months of screaming. Or maybe it’s the height of summer, or the days when you can’t stand the noise outside. I guess don’t really know. But the words feel kind of right to say.

The big, noisy final chorus was kind of a limb I went out on while making the demo for this one. I didn’t have a bridge or a last chorus, and because I was no longer looking at songs as needing to always be some anthem-like I used to, I was willing to risk ruining it by trying something new. So I just said to myself, “what if I put another chorus here and just made it really unpleasant?” The sounds you hear are guitarist Mike Bottiglieri (who also played mandolin and lap steel guitar on the track) in a tiny iso booth with his guitar and amp cranked manipulating the feedback. We had to put earplugs and gun range earmuffs on him for safety, and I had to give him visual cues instead of playback to track along with.

I feel like this track is a pretty essential example of the ways in which I’ve changed as an artist and as a person over the past couple of years.” – WW

That could be a reference to the Stroop Test, a psychological test used to measure the brain’s ability to fight cognitive interference, as well as to measure attention and memory.
The test consists of people being shown colored text that states a color’s name while also being written in a conflicting color of ink, then being asked to state the name of that color of ink.

It could also just be a different color to be funny, either way is pretty neat.

• French Translation