“Well, that song was written in a town in Italy called Lecce. It’s down in the boot heel at the very bottom of the country where I spent some time in 2011 on a sound residency with my wife and our kids. That song was generated there, and it’s loosely based on some images that I took from that place. We were staying in an older Italian apartment that had marble floors, like a really old, old-fashioned apartment, really beautiful place. We were walking around in this old town that didn’t have any tourists in it or anything like that. It just had something that stuck in my mind that got transferred to that song. I brought those chord changes with me to Italy, and it actually became a song there – I figured it out.”Lee Ranaldo (265)

“It’s loosely based on the kids I grew up with. When you’re at that teenage stage and you’re beginning to explore various things, adult things. It’s just kinda about that time of life when you’re searching and wondering what’s going to happen.”Lee Ranaldo (561)

“When I was in High School we had a couple of close friends whose parents would have to leave town every couple of weeks so everybody that we knew in the neighborhood could gather over at there house. You’re 15, 16 years old and starting to experiment with all kinds of things and feel the sense that that freedom road out in front of you, that road to adulthood is very magical, it’s an incredible time. My life took me a lot of places after that time, started traveling around the world with Sonic Youth, moved to New York City. 15 or 16 years later I went back to my old town and I found that a lot of my friends were still in that same place, the same situation we had been in like 15 or 20 years before. I was just kinda looking at this situation, wondering why some people’s lives take them  to all kinds of different places and other people are born, grow-up and die in the same town. It’s not a judgement call, I was just looking at it and thinking about it. I had one good friend called Xtina whose house was one of those houses that we used to go to a lot back then. She was still in that same house, same room. This song is for her.”Lee Ranaldo (562)

“This is about someone I knew growing up who was the smartest, most beautiful, funny, and talented girl at every party, and ended up just kinda disappearing into thin air.”Lee Ranaldo (563)

“I thought it was my hippy Western but I think it’s just seasonally appropriate for Halloween.”Lee Ranaldo (1289)

“It’s about the daily routines we all go through. You wake up in the morning, you have your coffee, you go out, you go to work, whatever it is, you do your thing, you come home at night, you have a glass of wine, you go to bed, you wake up, you have your coffee…I was just noticing those everyday things in my own life and just questioning, “isn’t there more than that going on here?” Of course there is.”Lee Ranaldo (1289)

“It’s loosely, poetically about Morocco. I’ve traveled there a bunch, not recently but quite a few times. I was sitting on this carpet that we’d brought back, it was like a blood red carpet and it had these yellow outlines of mountains on it. It just infused in the chord progression when I was working on it. It’s not directly about Morocco but Morocco somehow had a lot to do with it.”Lee Ranaldo (1289)

“This is my song for the resistance. We were working on this song last year before Election Day – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – and the filmmaker [Fred, maker of the documentary, ‘Hello, Hello, Hello’ about the making of the album – Ed] was in the studio and he said, “If by any chance Trump wins the election, this could be the song of the resistance you know”. It’s my song for looking ahead 50, 75, a 100 years looking at equal rights, looking at climate, looking at all the things we’d worked so hard for and not looking back to the 1940s white male impression of the what the world could be.”Lee Ranaldo (1289)