“This song is about the town that we come from. We come from a lot of places but the origin of this band will always be Bellingham, WA. A lot of the song is fiction but the first couple of lines of the song are truth. There was a summer in all of our lives where there was a house where all of our friends lived in Bellingham and when the sun would go down on a Saturday or Sunday evening, the people who lived in this house would take all of their furniture, every couch, ottamans, love seats and everything, and put it all in the front yard. We’d be practising or whatever and we’d go over to the girls’ house and we knew if the furniture was already in the front yard the party had been going for some time.”Ben Gibbard (116)

“This song is meant to be a series of affirmations in an otherwise dark and cruel world.”Ben Gibbard (116)

“When we were all living in Bellingham, working menial jobs, I used to have to take my laundry to this laundromat. It was the cleanest laundromat in all of town but the problem was that you had to put up with person who ran and owned the laundromat. He would come up and say some of the craziest stuff you’ve ever heard like, “People come in here and ask me how we’re going to stop kids going into schools and shooting the place up. Well I tell you, give the teachers guns.” And he really believed this. I used to pick up any local rag to look like I was reading so that he wouldn’t bother me and one day I was reading a book review about Frank Sinatra. There were lots of very interesting things about his life and I cherry picked some of the couplets of words and it became this song.”Ben Gibbard (116)

“This song is a paean to Bellingham. There’s a line in the song “We peered through the windows… new bottoms on barstools but the people remain the same, with prices inflating.” There is a bar called “The Beaver Tavern” and there was a time when you get a pitcher of beer for $3 which just seems insane to me now.”Ben Gibbard (116)

“One of my favorite writers is Raymond Carver. He had this way of writing stories about people living small lives and going through their own trials and tribulations. I wanted to create a story that involved two characters that were trapped by geography in Southern Florida and that they were keeping themselves captive. The city that surrounded them was seemingly closing in on them and this song was the outcome of that experience.”Ben Gibbard (116)